Abstract
In the first volume of their three-volume work entitled Aging and Society (1968), Matilda White Riley and Anne Foner produced the first comprehensive inventory of empirical studies on aging. Demonstrating the growing interest in age and aging processes, the scope of this work spanned many disciplines and included a wide array of topics including adjustment to retirement (Thompson et al. 1960), response to institutional care (Beyer and Woods 1963), and age composition of the labor force (Bancroft 1958). The varied approaches to questions of the nature and process of aging had resulted in a significant body of empirical information but, to date, as Riley and Foner accounted, as yet there was “…no unified body of knowledge, no general theory of aging, that can be transmitted to students, applied in professional practice, or tested and amplified through further research” (Riley and Foner 1968:1).
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Special thanks to Dale Dannefer, David Warner, and Duane Alwin who provided comments on a previous draft.
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Kelley-Moore, J.A., Lin, J. (2011). Widening the View: Capturing “Unobserved” Heterogeneity in Studies of Age and the Life Course. In: Settersten, R., Angel, J. (eds) Handbook of Sociology of Aging. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7374-0_4
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