Policy Center. He is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and several books, including Abundance of Life: Human Development Policies for an Aging Society (1988); Ethics in an Aging Society (1992); and The Five Stages of the Soul (1997), a study of spiritual growth in the second half of life. He is known for his work in older adult education and served as chairman of the board of Elderhostel (now Road Scholar). Dr. Moody retired as vice president for academic affairs for AARP in Washington, D.C. He is currently a visiting faculty member in the Creative Longevity and Wisdom Program at Fielding Graduate University, in Santa Barbara, California.Jennifer R. Sasser, PhD,is an educational gerontologist, transdisciplinary scholar, and community activist. Dr. Sasser has been working in the field of gerontology for more than half her life, beginning as a nursing assistant and senior citizen advocate before focusing on scholarly inquiry and education. As an undergraduate she attended Willamette University, in Salem, Oregon, graduating Cum Laude in psychology and music. Her interdisciplinary graduate studies at University of Oregon and Oregon State University focused on the human sciences, with specialization areas in adult development and aging, women’s studies, and critical social theory and alternative research methodologies. Dr. Sasser’s dissertation became part of a book published by Routledge in 1996 and coauthored with Dr. Janet Lee—Blood Stories: Menarche and the Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary U.S. Society.For the past 30 years, she has focused her inquiry in the areas of creativity in later life, aging and embodiment, transdisciplinary curriculum design, critical gerontological theory, transformational adult learning practices, and cross-generational collaborative inquiry. Dr. Sasser served as chair of the Department of Human Sciences and founding director of Gerontology at Marylhurst University from 1999 to 2015. She joined the Marylhurst faculty as an adjunct member of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies program in 1997 and during the subsequent 19 years was involved in designing many on-campus and web-based courses and programs for adult learners.An award-winning educator, Dr. Sasser received the 2012 Association for Gerontology in Higher Education Distinguished Teacher award and a Willamette University Distinguished Alumni award in 2014. From 2018 to 2020, she served as an instructor in the Human Development and Family Sciences program at Oregon State University, and she continues her long-term commitment to the Portland Community College Gerontology program.In addition to coauthoring Aging: Concepts and Controversies with Harry Moody, she is first author (with Moody) of Gerontology: The Basics (Routledge). Her other ongoing commitments include convening the Gero-Punk Project (www.geropunkproject.org), serving as a conversation facilitator for Oregon Humanities (www.oregonhumanities.org), and offering consulting, workshops, and presentations throughout North America.
Basic Concepts I A Life Course Perspective on Aging
Multigenerational families provide a vivid illustration of the life course perspective: Aging is a gradual, lifelong process we all experience, not something that happens only in later life.
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Learning Objectives
After reading Basic Concepts I, readers will:
1 Understand aging as a lifelong experience that is multifaceted and shaped by the contexts in which individuals live.
2 Be familiar with the central theories developed to understand and explain aging.
3 Identify the main biological processes thought to regulate aging.
4 Appreciate the ways in which social construction and historical factors influence our understandings of age, aging, and later life.
When we think about “aging,” we often call to mind the image of an old person. But the process of aging actually begins much earlier in life. We cannot fully understand what old age means unless we understand it as part of the entire course of human life, and this approach is called the life course perspective (Fuller-Iglesias, Smith, & Antonucci, 2009; Settersten, 2003).
Often our image of old age is misleading. For example, try to conjure a mental image of a college student. Now imagine a recent retiree, a grandmother, and a first-time father. Hold those images in mind and then consider the following facts:
The majority of college students are adults, not traditional-age students right out of high school.
Retirees from the military are typically in their 40s or 50s.
In some inner-city neighborhoods, it is not at all unusual to meet a 35-year-old grandmother whose daughter is a pregnant teenager.
It is no longer surprising for men in second marriages to become fathers for the first time at age 40 or 50.
Did some of those facts contradict the images you conjured, particularly images related to the ages people are when they fill certain roles? What this exercise tells us is that roles such as “student,” “retiree,” “grandmother,” and “first-time father” are no longer necessarily linked to a certain chronological age or life course stage. Today, what we are learning about aging is forcing us to reexamine traditional ideas about adult development and what it means to grow old. Both findings from biomedical science and social behavior among older adults challenge stereotypical images of what is “right” or “appropriate” for a specific age.
Although we tend to think of old age as a stage at the end of life, we recognize that it is shaped by a lifetime of experience. Conditions of living, such as social class, formal education, and occupation, are determinants of the individual’s experiences in old age. In other words, the last stage of life is the result of all the stages that come before it. The implication is that we no longer accept the quality of life in old age, or even the meaning of old age, as a matter of destiny. Rather, we view it as a matter of individual choice and social policy. Whether older people feel satisfaction and meaning may therefore depend on what they do and how social institutions support them in finding new purpose in later life (Kohli, 2007).
Recent biological research demonstrates that indeed people do not suddenly become old at the time we have defined as old age. Aging is a gradual process, and many human capabilities survive long past the time when persons living in North America are considered of an age to retire. We are learning more every day about how and why people grow old, with the hope that we can make the last stage of life just as meaningful in its own way as earlier stages are.
Focus on Practice
What Should We Call Older Adults?
In a New York Times column called “The New Old Age,” author Judith Graham asked: “What language do you think we should use to describe people who have advanced beyond the middle of their lives, and why?” She conducted informal interviews with several experts in the field to see what they had to say, and what she found speaks to the complexity of this issue. Senior citizen, elderly, older adult, older person, and elder are the most common terms used to refer to such a person. And there are arguments for and against using each of these terms. But what do persons who are in the later years of the life course call themselves? What do they want to be called? What might your future older self want to be called? These are important questions to ask in the context of the study of aging, as the focus of our research and practice is “people who have advanced beyond the middle years of their lives.”
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