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The Elderly & Disengagement & Activity Theories

Different cultures treat the elderly in different ways. Cox (1998) notes research showing an inverse relationship "between the degree of modernization and the status accorded old persons" (Cox, 1998, 1), which means that in the more industrialized nations, the older person has a lower status than is the case in less industrialized nations. This is something we can see all around us as our own culture celebrates youth to the exclusion of the old and has been charged with throwing away older people.

The position of the aged in modern society is clearly a reflection of the process of disengagement, referred to by Morgan & Kunkel (1998) in terms of retirement. Disengagement should be a social process that moves older people into a new arrangement, but still "into full participation within the social world" (Morgan & Kunkel, 1998, 6). Disengagement theory contrasts with activity theory, and activity theory in fact emerged as a response to disengagement theory. Activity theory offers a more normative view of aging. The theory holds that there is a positive relationship between activity and life satisfaction and that the greater the loss in role, the lower the life satisfaction.

American society has, by and large, become more remote from the individual in many ways, with a number of forces reducing the value of community and isolating individuals across the life cycle. This is a truism that is often misunderstood, as if our rural heritage had been one in which the extended family provided greater support than the urban nuclear family tends to offer to the elderly today. The reality is somewhat different:

The romantic image of the rural elderly passing their later years away in an idyllic country setting, surrounded by beautiful vistas and the extended family, has been abandoned as more realistic data have been gathered. The rural elderly, when compared with their urban counterparts, have less income, live in inferior h...

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The Elderly & Disengagement & Activity Theories. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:40, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702381.html