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1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Ian Stuart-Hamilton
Edited by
Ian Stuart-Hamilton
Ian Stuart-Hamilton
Affiliation:
University of Glamorgan
Ian Stuart-Hamilton
Affiliation:
University of Glamorgan
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Summary

OVERVIEW

This chapter introduces some general concepts of ageing. First, it presents different views of what ‘ageing’ is and when ‘old age’ begins. Second, it examines changes in life expectancy and the proportion of the population that is old. Third, it considers attitudes to ageing. The final section outlines the structure of the rest of the book and its rationale.

Different views of later life

Gerontology is the study of old age and ageing. Although everyone has an intuitive sense of what ‘old age’ and ‘ageing’ are, providing a watertight objective definition is surprisingly difficult. Ageing could be said simply to be the process of growing older. However, pedantically speaking, we are all ageing from the moment of conception: do we really wish to say that children are ‘ageing’? Hence, ageing is more sensibly described as change within old age or change that affects older people. It can thus include processes that started in earlier life but only manifest themselves in old age (e.g. a cardiovascular problem that appears in a person's sixties resulting from a poor lifestyle choice in that person's twenties). However, this begs the question of how to define ‘old age’. At first the issue seems a simple one. Putting the niceties of political correctness to one side for a moment, it is intuitively obvious that most people in their seventies and teens look radically different and this is reflected in measures of fitness and health.

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An Introduction to Gerontology , pp. 1 - 20
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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