Suchergebnisse

The "third age" is described as the period in the life course that occurs after retirement but prior to the onset of disability, revealing a period in which individuals have the capacity to remain actively engaged. This book serves as a comprehensive discussion about how the emergence of the third age has changed the way we think about and examine traditional frameworks regarding aging issues and the life course. It introduces the discussion of the unique challenges and opportunities that older adults face while moving through this early phase of later life, proposing new frameworks

Racially diverse educational settings yield various benefits according to past research. However, researchers have not fully considered how longlasting the benefits are and whether they exist for adults who attended school prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We analyze a national sample of older adults born between 1931 and 1953 to test for an association between attending a race discordant school in early life and socioeconomic status and social engagement in later life. We use OLS regression and propensity adjusted regression to account for early life factors that select children into race discordant schools. Findings indicate that race discordant schooling is associated with long-term educational benefits for Hispanic adults and greater wealth for Black adults at age 65. Attending a race discordant school was not correlated with socioeconomic outcomes in later life for Whites. Additionally, Black and White older adults who attended discordant schools reported higher levels of social engagement at age 65. To the extent our models successfully account for selection, early exposure to race discordant schools yielded some later-life benefits to all racial/ethnic groups and reduced racial/ethnic inequalities among older adults, despite growing up in a time of entrenched institutional racism and significant White opposition to school integration.

This paper reviews qualitative research in the United States, highlighting the ways research has changed in the era of the third age. With growing attention to positive and uplifting aspects of aging, qualitative research has played a critical role in the exploration of the ways in which older adults are engaging in meaningful ways with others. We describe two key methodological approaches that have been important to examining positive aspects of aging and exploring the extent to which a growing number of years of healthy retirement are redefining the aging experience: ethnographic research and grounded theory research. We also review key topics associated with qualitative research in the era of the third age. These topics fit within two dominant frameworks – research exploring meaningmaking in later life and research exploring meaningful engagement in later life. These frameworks were critically important to raising attention to meaningful experiences and interactions with others, and we propose that the agenda for future qualitative research in the United States should continue contributing to these frameworks. However, we note that a third framework should also be developed which examines what it means to be a third ager through use of a phenomenological approach, which will assist in the important task of theory building about the third age.