Which of the following occurs when people disengage from social roles that have been central to their self identity?

Theoretical Approaches: From Functionalism to Structured Dependency

Much of the reason for social gerontology's focus on the problems associated with later life lies in the emergence of retirement, in the 1940s in the United States9 and the 1960s in Britain,14 as a distinct part of the life course. This led sociologists working within the functionalist tradition such as Parsons and Burgess15,16 (an approach concerned with how elements of society operate in complementary ways) to worry about the “roleless role” of the retired person, a population defined by its permanent exit from the labor market rather than indigence. Obviously, this referred mainly to men, for whom their social role and employment were seen as largely interchangeable, whereas a consistent domesticated role was assumed for women. Criticism of this view, and the corresponding assumption that retirement was therefore relatively nonproblematic for women, came from Beeson,17 who noted that it was not based on any empirical evidence and ignored the existence of working women.

Some approached this roleless state through the prism of disengagement theory,18 focusing on the social and psychological adjustment of the older person to after work and after married life. Theorizing the wider processes that accompanied retirement, this theory hypothesized that older adults in industrial societies disengaged themselves from the roles they occupied so that younger generations would have opportunities to develop and take on their socially necessary roles. Consequently, disengagement was assumed not only to occur in relation to work roles, but also in relation to families, when retired generations became much less central to the lives of their children. Focusing on a psychological approach, disengagement theory saw itself as influenced by the work of Erikson and the notions of life review.19 A considerable amount of research was undertaken in the United States during the 1960s to provide evidence for this theory. A longitudinal study in Kansas City showed that older adults did indeed disengage, although women were observed to start this process at widowhood and men began on retirement.20 This approach, which for a long time was one of the dominant paradigms in social gerontology, saw the way in which old age occurred in modern societies as an inevitable and natural process. Questions about whether older adults wanted to disengage, or were forced to do so by society, were not asked. The emphasis on psychological adjustment also avoided looking at the very real social processes that structured old age.

Although disengagement theory centered on the perspective of the individual older person, the analysis put forward by the predominantly British structured dependency approach stressed the importance of social policy.21 For writers in this school and those who described themselves as adopting the political economy approach to aging, the problem of old age was not one of individual social and psychological adjustment but of a dependency structured by the circumstances of retirement, something that was set by government social policy.22-24 Townsend noted that retirement not only marks a withdrawal from the formal labor market, but also indicates a shift from making a living through earning a wage to being dependent on a replacement income.21 The fact that this income was often funded by the state demonstrated the role of social policy in structuring the dependency that many older people experienced after retirement. In Britain, for example, the relatively low levels at which the state pension was paid out indicated the low priority that older adults had in decisions about state welfare. As Walker22 and others have noted, the continuing impact of social class into later life was also indicated in the relative imbalance among the levels of state retirement pensions that funded most working class retirees' old age and the amounts paid out by the better funded occupational pensions enjoyed by the middle class. Those reliant on state retirement pensions, consequently, were seen as a residual category of the population drawing resources from public funds, a problem that led to considerable interest in researching poverty in later life.

Role Theory, Disengagement Theory, and Activity Theory

The modernization and aging theory is one of two major formal social theories of aging. We now consider disengagement theory, the most important formal theoretical approach at the micro or social psychological level, although it did have a social structural component and was explicitly formulated as a theory about the link between the individual and society. Its formalization included nine postulates and several explicit corollary statements. Its major premise was that, with aging, there was a mutual severing of the ties between the individual and society, and that this was a good thing for both. Social structural change is defined as disengagement if it involves “a thinning out of the number of members in the social structure surrounding the individual, a diminishing of interactions with these members, and a restructuring of the goals of the system” (Cumming and Henry, 1961: 37). Engagement is measured by a count of social role occupancy, a subjective rating of the amount of time spent in normatively governed interaction with others, and an actual count of the number of interactions. Social structure in this structural-functionalist view is conceptualized as a complex system of interlocking status positions, to which role expectations correspond. Social integration during this period of theorizing was equated with adaptation of the older person to society, and adaptation in turn was considered to be indexed by life satisfaction, morale, or happiness. The structural-functional theoretical foundations of this work saw the individual as nothing other than a bundle of roles, spiced with some need dispositions and personality characteristics. In this conceptualization the individual was largely reactive – either to societal demands or to presumably inevitable and universal pressures of physiological and psychological development.

In the general research program from which the disengagement theory was developed, and the subsequent social psychological emphasis on adjustment, the major independent variables entered into models to predict variability in life satisfaction were dispositional or personality factors, or were largely restricted to three domains: health, income security, and social integration. These, in turn, were largely unexamined variables. Few scholars theorized about the causes of variability in health, wealth, or social integration, and no one studied this topic from a life course perspective. To do so would have shifted attention away from the social psychological level toward a social structural level of analysis and required people working with cross-sectional data to think longitudinally. Moreover, to do so would have been a stretch away from the overall individualistic bias of the social sciences in North America.

Activity theory was invented by Cumming and Henry as a foil for their presentation of disengagement theory. They asserted that it was an implicit theory. The response to disengagement theory led to more formal explication of the activity theory by Havighurst et al. using data from the Kansas City studies and by Maddox and other scholars using data from the Duke Longitudinal Survey of Aging. The debate was joined by other American social gerontologists and dominated gerontology conferences and publications for many years. More developed theoretical formalization and testing was conducted by Lemon et al. and by Longino and Kart. The results, overall, favored activity theory in that life satisfaction was more often found to be associated with higher levels of social integration (measured by a role count) than not. Personality factors were found to be in play. The most damning critiques of disengagement theory argued that much disengagement from social roles was involuntary, occurring, for example, through widowhood and retirement. For all its faults, disengagement theory at least tried to be a theory, but it was not precisely conceptualized, making it difficult to test.

We have grouped activity and disengagement theory into the category of role theories because a structural-functionalist conceptualization of role is common to both. Other scholars, without entering this specific debate, used the same conceptualization of roles. Irving Rosow, the most prominent theorist to do so, spent most of his career articulating a functionalist understanding of aging in terms of role occupancy and argued that socialization for role occupancy in old age was problematic for several reasons, including low motivation to learn the role and a dearth of formal teachers or role models.

Activity Versus Disengagement

In the 1950s and early 1960s, gerontologists disagreed as to which psychological approach to aging was healthier. Many endorsed thedisengagement theory, who posited that letting go of the trappings of earlier life was the key to successful aging. The icon of this theory was an old man in a rocking chair on the front porch. Other gerontologists were advocates of theactivity theory, who believed that staying active and engaged was the key to healthy aging. Their icons were people who some referred to as representatives ofexceptional aging, people like Pablo Casals, who in his 90s was still actively performing as a musician.

As the data came in, it became clear that activity and engagement are healthier for most older persons than disengagement. That is, of course, provided the individual is realistic and makes the needed adjustments to losses and changing life circumstances discussed in the previous section.

Unfortunately, the retirement industry was founded based on the disengagement theory and has been slow to adjust. The developers of Sun City, Arizona—the prototypical retirement community on which thousands of others were subsequently modeled—hired gerontologists who were proponents of disengagement.14 This led to creation of communities prohibiting adult residents younger than 55 years (and children), focused on leisure activities, such as golf and shuffleboard, and encouraged the attitude, “You’ve worked hard; you deserve to relax.”

Attitudes are, however, beginning to change, but they still have a long way to go. To promote healthy engagement in late life, more work opportunities need to be created for older adults that are interesting, part time, flexible, and adapted to promote continued productive engagement. More older persons need to be engaged as volunteers and entrepreneurs; and older adults need more opportunities to be integrated into the rest of society. Such developments are consistent with current theories of “successful aging” and may well keep older adults in the workforce and volunteer service longer, providing a clear benefit to broader society.15

Summary

Early research on social support and aging had a pessimistic attitude regarding older adults’ need to remain socially engaged (eg, Disengagement theory); however, more recent research has found that aging adults are satisfied with their relationships in later life and that aging adults tend to experience fewer conflicts in the relationships that they do have. These findings may be due, in part, to conflict resolution strategies that are employed by older (but not younger) adults, an increased “say” in how leisurely time is spent, and with greater selectivity in terms of whom an aging person chooses to spend time with (eg, preference for those who provide a rewarding relationship). There is a robust body of literature showing that social support has repeatedly been linked to better health and cognitive/mental outcomes. Interventions designed to increase social ties among “at risk” older adults have been met with some success. Overall, the research suggests that social systems do not necessary diminish with time, in fact, relationships appear to be more rewarding and satisfactory as adults age.

Spirituality, Aging, and Lifelong Learning

Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam proposed a theory of gerotranscendence, the notion that with age comes a radically different life outlook reflecting a cosmological shift in perception. Tornstam argued that when activity theory eclipsed disengagement theory something of vital importance was lost. Disengagement theorists highlighted an inward reflective tendency emerging in later life that denoted a change in how older people saw the world and their places within it. The problem, said Tornstam, was that these older individuals had limited resources for cultivating the new perspective that was emerging in their lives. Activity theory, he argued, for all the good it did, tended to devalue the spiritual growth of the older person, equating religiosity with social withdrawal.

From his large-scale quantitative and qualitative research – a Scandinavian version of the Kansas City study – Tornstam also found a pronounced age-related change. His subjects accepted a more nuanced sense of right and wrong, had greater tolerance for ambiguity and paradox in moral reasoning, and were able to detach themselves from the narrower cultural views of their earlier decades. In short, these individuals experienced “a new feeling of cosmic communion with the spirit of the universe,” an age-triggered self-transformation that Tornstam called gerotranscendence. The Swedish sociologist argued that this was a naturally occurring transition that would be more strikingly evident if our societies (including their religious institutions) gave older people sufficient encouragement and support to make this spiritual passage to a unique late life outlook.

It is around the same time that Tornstam's articles started appearing in American journals that the spirituality and aging movement began to grow in the United States. The New York State-based Omega Institute started organizing Conscious Aging conferences in 1992 with a host of high-profile figures such as counterculture guru and spiritual author Baba Ram Dass (who had recently discovered his own aging and written a book about it), Jewish mystic Rabbi Zalman Schechter-Shalomi, social activist and Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, and other visionaries who championed the role of both the secularly wise, politically active senior and the spiritual elder. Though Tornstam was not part of this cast of conscious aging advocates, his research-based theory and Erikson's model of development supported the views espoused at these conclaves.

In the field of aging, concurrent with this movement, the American Society on Aging (ASA) launched a new constituent unit, the Forum on Religion, Spirituality and Aging (FORSA), which grew quickly in membership. From Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi's book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, a number of Spiritual Eldering Institutes were established to do what Tornstam suggested was missing, namely, to nurture older people's capacity for reaching a new level of development so that they might play new roles in society as spiritual mentors to younger generations.

Scholars, advocates, and religious leaders did not cause people to suddenly want to become spiritual elders. This trend reflected a worldwide revival of religious interest, if not zeal, that also swept into the older population and into the field of aging. The trend has also had a profound impact on expanding mainstream older learner programs to include training in yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi and numerous courses on comparative religion, mysticism, Chinese medicine, ancient and modern mythology, and so on.

Disengagement Theory/Activity Theory

The term disengagement refers to the withdrawal of people from previous roles or activities. Starting from the assumption that people turn inward from middle age on, Cumming and Henry theorized in 1961 that this primary mental process produces (1) a natural and normal withdrawal from social roles and activities, and (2) an increasing preoccupation with self and decreasing emotional involvement with others. In positing the universality and normality of withdrawal, disengagement theory has been criticized for being neither natural nor inevitable. While the theory professes to explain general psychological and social processes of aging, it offers only a one-sided view of the aged, given the significant proportion of older people who do not lose interest in life and do not withdraw from society.

Disengagement theory encouraged the development of an opposing theory of the aged, activity theory, which is based on the concept of development tasks. According to its main proponent, Robert J. Havighurst, activity theory states that in order to maintain a positive sense of self, elderly persons must substitute new roles for those lost in old age. As such, activity theory presents a broader view of older people.

Social Aging

The most relevant perspectives for understanding social aging as it relates to leisure would appear to be those arguments that deal directly with continuities and discontinuities within aging individuals and how they relate to older people's well-being. The two that fought for primacy in gerontological thinking throughout the last quarter century – the much maligned disengagement theory and its antagonist activity theory – have receded somewhat to the background in favor of continuity theory and its modifiers, which emphasize adaptation by the aging individual. Disengagement theory's assumptions of a rational disconnecting from one's role relationships with co-workers and then family and friends has come under serious theoretical and empirical attack. While it is true that the theory may owe too much to biological reductionism and represent an apologia for the kinds of mistreatments society's representatives have bestowed on aging individuals in the not-too-distant past, nevertheless, there may be a kernel of truth to the idea that aging in some individuals can be seen through a disengagement lens.

Activity theory too has come under attack, primarily because of the lack of demonstrable causality in the many cross-sectional studies that purported to show a high level of activity correlating with a high level of well-being among older individuals. Based on studies employing longitudinal data, the discovery that older individuals who were never particularly socially active in their free time might find themselves to be unhappy at unwanted increases in their social participation levels indicates a more complex association between activity levels and well-being than originally believed. It is possible that the continuation of low levels of activity, as well as high ones, correlates positively with well-being – not high levels per se. Again, for some of the aging population, being active may very well be a key to successful aging. Such individuals illustrate Ekerdt's notion of the busy ethic, which is retirement's parallel to work's ‘Puritan work ethic.’

At first glance, continuity theory and its amenders would appear to be the umbrella under which ideas connecting leisure activity to well-being could most efficiently be gathered. Retirement as a discontinuity of major proportions for many individuals, of course, complicates the fit between theory and data. Again, however, the busy ethic idea suggests an ideal way in which the problems produced by this discontinuity can be minimized.

Classic approaches to aging in social contexts

Interestingly, theoretical conceptions of the social environment in later adulthood often relied on metaphors derived from features of the physical world when referring to social experiences in later adulthood. This includes concepts such as social strata, social convoy, social network, support bank, closeness, distance, or life space as metaphoric descriptions of specific aspects of an individual's social world. Such metaphors serve to keep in mind that all social relationships occur in time as well as in space. Even the now “classic” theories of social aging such as disengagement theory and activity theory have, at least implicitly, acknowledged that aspects of the physical world are relevant for better understanding of social functioning in later life.

According to disengagement theory (Cumming and Henry, 1961), older individuals are seen as limiting their social life spaces in response to societal pressures and in order to prepare for the final phase of their lives. Cumming and Henry (1961) explicitly referred to Lewin's (1936) notion of a psychological life space when they introduced their concept of social lifespace as reflecting the individual's decreasing social opportunities during the aging process. Activity theory emphasized that being socially engaged in a variety of social roles both within and outside the family contributes to better functioning and better life quality (Havighurst, Neugarten, and Tobin, 1968; Lemon, Bengtson, and Peterson, 1972). Keeping a physical or geographical distance from members of younger generations is seen as protecting the older individual from stressful social demands and ensuring maximal freedom to develop age-adequate and adaptive patterns of social activity that contribute to increased well-being. Tartler (1961) introduced the idea of “feeling close at a physical distance” as one adaptive feature of parent-child relationships related to a better quality of the relationship. Empirical findings could support the notion of “intimacy at a distance” (Rosenmayr and Köckeis, 1965) as an adaptive regulatory mechanism of intergenerational relationships (Frankel and DeWit, 1989; Wagner, Schütze, and Lang, 1999). For example, in a study with 454 older parents, Frankel and DeWit (1989) found that greater geographical distance was a strong predictor of reduced contact with adult children but was significantly less strongly associated with the experience of important conversations with children. This indicates that the parent-child tie appears to remain emotionally meaningful irrespective of the physical distance. Emotional closeness in relationships may thus be an important compensation mechanism for overcoming seemingly insurmountable geographic distance.

In his social integration theory, Rosow (1974) argued that loss of social roles in later life requires that individuals develop new age-specific and age-adequate social roles. According to the theory, older people, who live in age-segregated environments, are more likely to identify themselves with their age group and their neighborhood. Consequently, they are more likely to engage in community activities when there is no interference with the interests of the younger generation. Empirical findings are not quite consistent, though. For example, older people living in age-segregated neighborhoods were more satisfied with their living circumstances than those who lived in nonsegregated quarters (Messer, 1967; Sherman, 1975). However, it was shown that the positive effect of age segregation is mostly related to differences in socio-economic wealth. Vaskovics (1990) reported that in regions with good infrastructure and a high-quality living standard, age concentration in the neighborhood was unrelated to living satisfaction. Despite the lack of empirical evidence, social integration theory has made a significant contribution in linking facets of the social and the physical environment in the aging process.

Early science

The scientific quest to understand successful aging is as old as the disciplines of geriatrics and gerontology. In the first issue of The Gerontologist, Havighurst (1961) introduced the term “successful aging” to the gerontological community. Havighurst contended that the purpose of the science of gerontology is “adding life to the years” and that one of the major aims of gerontology is to provide advice about the societal and individual choices that would help people age successfully. For Havighurst, a theory of successful aging that could identify the conditions of individual and social life under which individuals achieve a maximum of satisfaction and happiness was critical.

Two competing theories dominated Havighurst’s day. Activity theory (Havighurst & Albrecht, 1953) contended that successful aging means maintenance of the activities and attitudes of middle age for as long as possible and then substitution of new activities for those that must be abandoned. Laying the foundation for what would become Atchley’s (1989) Continuity Theory, Havighurst (1961) described successful aging as “maintenance of the level and range of activities that characterize a person in his prime of life with a minimum downward adjustment” (p. 10). Disengagement theory (Cumming & Henry, 1961), on the other hand, asserted that successful aging means acceptance and desire for the process of disengagement from active life. To choose between these theories, Havighurst (1961) said, “All that is required is an operational definition of successful aging and a method of measuring the degree to which people fit this definition” (p. 9). This seemingly simplistic solution has challenged scholars for decades. In Havighurst’s time, there were many measures of successful aging and all of them had their critics. Havighurst and his colleagues developed a measure of life satisfaction that had five components—zest versus apathy; resolution and fortitude; goodness of fit between desired and achieved goals; positive self-concept; and mood tone. The scale was used mainly to test Activity Theory, as Disengagement Theory soon fell out of favor, criticized for suggesting that disengagement was innate, universal, and unidirectional.

While Havighurst defined successful aging from the older person’s point of view, Katz and his colleagues (Katz, Ford, Moskowitz, Jackson, & Jaffee, 1963) contended that successful aging should be viewed from the perspective of researchers and clinicians. As a geriatrician and health services researcher, Sidney Katz set out to create a tool to measure gains and losses in physical function associated with age. According to Katz et al. (1963), the Index of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) provides an objective approach with which to study the aging process “if one considers aging as a composite of a number of deteriorating physiological functions” (p. 98). Although Katz and his colleagues did not propose their Index as a measure of successful aging, Kusumastuti et al. (2016), using a novel, hypothesis-free, analysis of citation networks, rightly identified Katz’ work as the origin of the biomedical, objective conceptualization of successful aging. As successful aging research developed, gains and losses in physical functioning became an integral component of what it means to age successfully.

For nearly 30 years, research about successful aging followed the independently developed traditions of Havighurst and of Katz. In fact, it was not until 1987 that the two literatures began to cite each other (Kusumastuti et al., 2016). Once the literatures became aware of one another, the idea that physiologic, psychological, and social attributes somehow jointly influenced successful aging began to develop.

Example 1: Community and resilience

One area in which ethnographers have made continual contributions is in understanding the social organization of aging communities. Classic monographs such as Arlie Hochschild’s The Unexpected Community (1973) and Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days (1980) have played an important role in shaping understandings of what it means to age. While conducted nearly five decades ago, The Unexpected Community still provides a vivid account of the possibilities of aging and community. Responding to the then dominance of disengagement theory in sociology and gerontology—a model which positioned aging as a period of inevitable social withdrawal—Hochschild used her observations of an age-segregated senior housing project to reveal a vibrant community that ran counter to those predictions. Her findings showed how engagement with peers in age-segregated communal spaces can be not only functional, but aid in producing a sense of community and efficacy in later life.

Published a few years later, Number Our Days became an iconic study of community, aging, and resilience. Myerhoff’s study profiled how a group of Jewish immigrants navigated the challenges of growing older in the context of urban America. She powerfully described how her subjects responded to physical, psychological, and environmental changes which had implications for their social identities: for example, changes in memory, declining mobility, neighborhood change, and the assimilation and outmigration of their children. She charted the development of a resilient cultural response which positioned aging as a time of learning and growth rather than simply loss. Myerhoff’s work was also notable in its ability to reach a wide audience beyond the academy.

Contemporary field studies continue to show the surprising and sometimes counterintuitive ways older adults form communities, often in ways that are not adequately captured using methods such as surveys (cf. Torres, 2019). In each case, field studies reveal how and why communities of older adults operate in real-world settings as well as the limitations of prior theoretical and empirical accounts.