Social gerontology, or the sociology of aging, has two primary foci: (a) social factors during late life, and (b) social antecedents and consequences of aging. Thus, social gerontology includes examination of both the status of being old and the process of becoming old. Increasingly, theories and methods of the life course are replacing the earlier emphasis on late life as a separate topic of inquiry. This is a vast arena, and the sociology of aging is appropriately informed by the theories and methods of many sociological subspecialities ranging from macrohistorical and demographic perspectives to the microorientations of social psychology and interpretive sociology.

History of the Field

Historically, social gerontology emerged from a social-problems orientation and focused on the deprivations and losses that were expected to characterize late life (e.g., Burgess 1960; Cain 1959). Early research in the field focused on issues...