Social gerontology looks at the social contacts of older people with others. It looks at interactions of older people with relatives and friends and it also looks at which roles older people play in society. When people get older, social roles and social interactions change. The roles and interactions also vary across Europe. There are different disciplines involved in social gerontology. The social sciences, arts and humanities are involved in social gerontology when it comes to the study of the social context of ageing, the review of policies and interventions and the impact of population ageing upon society. There are three areas of activity that social gerontology focuses upon:

• The micro-level: This approach looks at the individual level experience of old age and tries to answer questions related to the meaning, experience, interpretation and social roles. Investigation for this approach tries to help older people better understand the meaning of certain things, like loneliness. It also looks at the value and meaning older people give to different relationships and different modes of engagement, like computer and phone contacts.

• The meso-level: This analysis looks at the importance of social context and social structures for the experience of ageing for individuals and groups. This perspective looks at the influence of ethnicity, gender and class on the experience of later life. This research looks at the inequalities in the experience of ageing

• The macro-level: This perspective looks at the social context of ageing at the societal level. This perspective looks at the demographic, cultural and economic changes that result from the increase in the numbers of older people. The main focus has been on the societal effects of population ageing but it is now looking at global trends, like globalisation and the interactions with population ageing.

Theories and concepts

Before looking at certain theories, one must first know what is meant by theory in the context of social gerontological research. One must first know what a theory is and how useful it is in gerontology. The word ‘theory’ has different meanings in different contexts and fields of study. Basically, theories help people to explain a series of empirical findings or observations. But, theory in the field of social gerontology has been perceived as problematic. It appears that there is an imbalance between the accumulation of data and the development of theory. Researchers also claim that they have collected a pile of data that has little attention to basic assumptions and big theoretical issues. However, not everything is negative in this field. There are also a broad range of theoretical perspectives in gerontology. Theories can be classified in different ways and many typologies may be applied.

Activity, disengagement and continuity theory

A theory of age that operates at the individual level and that arose in the early years of gerontology, looked at activity, disengagement and gerontology. This theory arose from sociology. Society was seen as mirroring a biological entity and all component parts, like family, work and education were interrelated to produce an ordered society. Together with the concern that population ageing is a social problem, this paradigm produced a couple of theories that were linked to each other. These theories were disengagement, continuity and activity theories. These theories focus on explaining social relationships in later life, but they also kind of show how people should age. Disengagement theory was first seen as a disengagement from the workplace and other social relationships. People saw it as inevitable and a natural process and people thought that society benefited from it, because it facilitated an easy transfer of roles across generations and individuals. This theory suggests that there is a triple loss for the individual. There is a loss of roles, a reduction of engagement with social values and a reduction of social relationships. These theories have implications at the level of the individual and the experiences of ageing. When you look at social relationships, disengagement favours older people withdrawing from social engagement and implies that isolation is like disengagement theory in action. However, scientists have empirical data describing reduced social engagement with increasing age, but the adaptive nature of these changes is unproven and thus there is no support for the disengagement theory. This theory also has a bit of critique upon it. The disengagement theory devaluates ageing implicitly, and the importance of older people in society and their contribution to society is devaluated.

Activity theory accepts the maintenance of roles and social relationships as the key to successful ageing and posits that new activities and roles should be adopted, in order to compensate for the roles lost through retirement, or other transactions, like widowhood. From the activity theory perspective, the maintenance of social relationships in later life is seen as central to a successful old age. This perspective is maybe the first contemporary theory to promote the idea of successful ageing. Continuity theory is less prescriptive and emphasises that older people will seek to preserve the activities and social relationships acquired over a lifetime. It also proposes that any changes will be adaptive. Continuity theory is more adaptive and offers the loss of some forms of activity and the possibility for new activities.

Critical gerontology

There was some critique on these functionalist theories and the critique was that they fail to engage with the influence of important social structures, like class, gender, age and ethnicity in shaping the experience of ageing. Also, they do not focus upon the experiences of individuals. Functionalists did not examine how certain factors, like material resources, may promote or limit the opportunities for social interaction. There is little evidence that material resources are associated with both isolation and loneliness. This doesn’t seem strange, because a lack of resources may inhibit social engagement. Contemporary theories have tried to address these limitations. Critical gerontology is an influential school that was developed from the notion that old age is socially constructed by interactions with the social context and constrained by socio-structural factors like class, race and gender. One of the theories within the critical gerontology was the political economy of old age. This theory tries to understand the position of older people and the experience of old age as it relates to an advanced capitalist society. A critique of critical gerontology was the it over-emphasis upon social class and that it doesn’t focus enough attention on autonomy ascribed to older people.

Lifecourse perspective

Lifecourse has been important in the development of gerontological theorising and frameworks. This perspective has several interpretations. Grenier differentiates between the personological approach and the institutional approach. This last approach focused more upon later life and it looks at the lifecourse as a foundation for social organisation. Lifecourse consists of a series of stages which people pass through as they get older. Often, but not always, some significant event marks the transition from one stage or role to the next. Lifecourse is differentiated into smaller segments by certain subgroups, like pre-school, middle age and adolescence. These are seen as distinct phases. Lifecourse is also no a single entity, but consists of different spheres, like education and family. Three different types of time must be distinguished, in order to understand the lifecourse. These three are historical time, biological time and social time. The historical time defines the temporal context and the social time relates to the meaning that is attributed to the different stages of life. These dimensions inter-relate and they produce a pattern of lifestages. This perspective can highlight how certain patterns of disadvantages and advantages can influence the experience of ageing. This means that social engagement in later life can be understood within the framework of the lifecourse of a person in terms of the opportunities a historical and cultural context has offered them, the social advantages or disadvantages somebody acquired over a lifetime and the personal preferences of that person.

The current state of Europe

Ageing occurs in a social context which ranges from the micro-scale (individual), to the meso-level (community) and to the macro-level (society). The writers argue that to understand social engagement, one must look within the life course perspective and at the influence of historical and cultural time and structural factors, like gender and class. Ageing and later life is not a homogeneous experience and it doesn’t affect every person within the same society in the same fashion. All older people are not alike and the characteristics that existed before the person got old, have a strong influence across the life course. When we are old our health, material and social resources are influenced by our experiences prior to the old age. With the popularity of constructs like ‘successful ageing’, the importance of the social context for the shaping of the experience of old age has assumed greater prominence. Many scholars argue that successful ageing consists of longevity and quality of life and that these two are prompted by the interaction of three types of factors. The first is social engagement, the second is reduction of disease and the third is promotion of high levels of mental and physical functioning.

Social engagement

Studies have looked whether social relationships in later life are experienced in the same way by people of similar ages across Europe. One big survey that was held, was the European Social Survey and it gives us more information about the frequency of contact with friends, relatives and colleagues across a range of European countries. The survey also gives more information about loneliness experienced. Northern European countries like the Netherlands and Norway show low levels of loneliness (less than 10%), high levels of weekly contact with relatives and friends (+60%) and 20% of these people rate their levels of social engagement as higher than their peers. The former communist countries show the opposite pattern and the countries in South Europe occupy an intermediate pattern. The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe gives information into the involvement of older people in Europe. This involvement was involvement in a formal social organisation. The survey found that approximately 31% of the people aged 50+ participated in a formal social organisation. Of course, there are variations in levels of community based participation between different countries. Again, social participation was highest in northern countries like the Netherlands and Sweden, but also in Switzerland. The rates were lower in Italy, Spain and Eastern European countries.

Most surveys look at social relationships on an individual basis, but older people have a range of relationships that include family, friends, neighbours and colleagues. These relationships are seen as the social network of an individual and they provide emotional, social and practical support across the lifecourse. The convoy model of support suggests that the convoys of support that go along with us across the lifecourse vary between individuals and over time. This suggests that the oldest old reduce their number of ties and they focus on the most meaningful relationship and disengage from the peripheral ones. Research has shown that social networks are larger in Northern European countries than in Southern or Eastern European countries. Researchers have also looked into how satisfied old people are with their relationships. In one study, satisfaction was asked in two ways and the results of these two ways were compared. The first way was to self-rate the social relations on a 5 point scale and there was no distinction between family, neighbours or friends. The second way was done by giving the older people two vignettes with stories about a person on them. They had to rate how satisfied the individual in the vignette was with their relations. According to the data, people were most satisfied with their relations in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Germany and Sweden and least satisfied in Italy, Greece, Spain and France (the only East-European countries that were surveyed were Poland and the Czech Republic). However, the researchers of that survey saw that the results were different when only looking at the vignettes. When they only looked at the vignettes, the countries highest in satisfaction were Sweden, Italy, Germany and Denmark, those average in satisfaction were France, Poland, Belgium and the Czech Republic and those lowest in satisfaction were Spain, Greece and the Netherlands!

Social gerontology focuses much at the experience of loneliness and isolation in old age. Loneliness can be conceptualised in many ways, but all definitions mention the deficit between the desired quantity/quality of social relationships and the reality of a person’s social engagement. This gap is seen as the feeling of loneliness. Research shows that loneliness is one of the most feared aspects of growing older. There are different authors that have studied the distribution of loneliness across Europe. The measures used to measure loneliness vary across the studied, but there is a similarity across the studies in terms of the distribution of loneliness across Europe. The similarities are that there is a group of former Soviet bloc countries with rates of loneliness of +20% (Russia, Hungary, Ukraine), there is a group of northern European countries with low rates of loneliness of 10% and under (the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Germany) and there is an intermediate loneliness group were loneliness is in the 15-20% range (Spain, France, Austria).

Loneliness in the United Kingdom

Loneliness is quite a complex thing and it is culturally, temporally and historically situated and it is variable in the experience of old age. There have been many studies done that focus on the prevalence and risk factors for loneliness in the United Kingdom. The studies that were done in the late 1940s and early 1950s, revealed that 10% of those aged 60+ reported that they were lonely most of the time. This has remained consistent across 60 years. Researchers still do debate about the risk factors associated with loneliness. Researchers do agree that widowhood and a reduction in the number of confiding relationships show a relationship with loneliness, but they do not agree on whether age and gender are independent risk factors for loneliness. In the United Kingdom context, physical health isn’t a risk factor for loneliness, but expectations about health and quality of life are. There is also a link between loneliness and material resources. The old population in the United Kingdom is dynamic, because after the WO II, many migrants from the Caribbean and South Asia moved to the United Kingdom and they are old now. Research shows that these populations show high rates of loneliness. This suggests that the factors that influence the context for social relations and the experience of social relations will be dynamic as well.

Studies that have examined loneliness longitudinally, have reported that loneliness is a dynamic experience. Some people are lonely in one period of old age, while less lonely in another. The factors associated with deteriorating loneliness are widowhood, deteriorating physical health and a decreased number of confidents. One study showed that the prevalence of loneliness shows a U-shaped distribution. The rates are highest for those aged under 25 and 65 years and over. Depression is associated with loneliness for all age groups. Poor physical health is only associated with loneliness in young adult and midlife, but not later life. For the people in mid and later life, the quality of social engagement is protective against loneliness, for young adults it is the quantity of social engagement. Different factors may protect against loneliness at different stages of life. Preventive strategies or interventions need to be developed that reflect these differences.

Globalization

Globalization influences the context within which current and future cohorts experience old age. Globalisation is the trend whereby the world is become more and more interconnected as a result of multinational organisations, increased trade, migration and cultural exchange. Some researchers say that population ageing can’t just be seen as a national issue, but it has to be looked upon at an international level;. Globalisation as a social phenomenon influences older people within developed and developing countries. This is because it widens the inequalities between the working people and the older people. One facet of globalization is the transnational community. This community results from the migration of people and families across the globe for economic and political imperatives. During the 50s, 60s and 70s of the last decade, many migrants from former British colonies moved to Britain. These migrants were from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These big migrant populations and their ageing in the European countries has created a complex web of social relationships between the country they came from and the country where they live in now. This brings challenges for social policy. Gerontologists are now investigating the experience of ageing within a transnational context. They look at the complexity of ageing experienced by migrants and how the outflow of migrants influenced the experience of old age for those left behind in the country of origin. Gerontologists have much work to do and many challenges up ahead, because of the globalisation of the world.