College of Health

This chapter takes a broad view of scholarship on the sociology of aging, highlighting how the contours and content of the field have changed over the last 30 years. The chapters of the Handbook of Sociology of Aging provide fertile grounds for these observations. Each chapter traces the evolution of important ideas, synthesizes knowledge, and offers compelling new directions for future inquiry on specific topics. This handbook illustrates the fact that one of the greatest strengths of the sociology of aging is the wide range of topics and methods that characterizes the field. To generate additional observations on the field, we examined a wide range of books and articles on behavioral and social aspects of aging, including three decades of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, The Gerontologist, and Research on Aging.