Читать книгу New Perspectives on Older Language Learners - Miriam Neigert - Страница 11

Internal and external factors affect how we age and they add to the individuality of the ageing process. Some of these factors we can control more easily than others. It is, for example, mostly our choice if we live healthily without smoking and follow a good diet, hoping to decrease our chances of serious illnesses as we get older. But some other factors, which impact how our bodies and minds age, we cannot influence. For example, current cultural notions of age and ageing influence our perception of what is considered old or how we evaluate old age. Furthermore, political or historical events, such as wars or crises, impact the lives and ageing of a cohort or generation. It is for reasons like these that variability among individuals increases with age (Dannefer & Settersten 2010: 4). This, in turn makes it difficult to come to a definition of an older age group such as the young-old.

I have taken the term young-old from literature on lifespan development and gerontology – the most prominent use of it being in an article by Neugarten (1974). In the 20^th century, life expectancy (also referred to as population ageing or societal ageing) has been increasing rapidly and researchers have started to further divide the old age phase of life (Phillips et al. 2010: 171; Nolda 2008). The former one-dimensional old age phase (after retirement) is now more commonly divided into young-old (Third Age) as well as old-old and oldest old (fourth age) (Laslett 1987; Neugarten 1974, Bromley 1990: 42). Alongside the term young-old, the term ‘third agers’ has been increasingly used when referring to members of an age group spanning from shortly before, to approximately 10 or 15 years after, retirement (see section 2.1.3).

A perspective I would like to use as a starting point for my discussion of the young-old appears in Neugarten’s (1974) article on age groups in American society. According to Neugarten, perceptions of the life cycle and stages in life have changed. Over the last centuries, concepts such as childhood or middle age have been introduced or become more explicit in our minds due to societal changes (e.g. industrialization). She postulates that the 20^th century has been the onset of forming another distinctive age group or phase in life: the young-old and their demarcation from the old-old (1974: 190f.). She defines the young-old as “relatively healthy, relatively affluent, relatively free from traditional responsibilities of work and family and who are increasingly well educated and politically active” (1974: 187). Even though Neugarten acknowledges the limited meaning of chronological age for defining an age group such as the young-old, she sets the age range at 55 to 75. Nevertheless, she sees a more important or defining characteristic of the young-old in the sociological marker of retirement (1974: 191). From these initial words on the young-old, it becomes clear that given the increased variability in old age as well as the attempt to set boundaries in terms such as chronological age, the definition of ‘young-old’ sails between vagueness and oversimplification.

We find four different dimensions of age or ageing in the gerontological literature (Karl 2009: 23; Phillips et al. 2010: 12): biological, chronological, sociological, and psychological. Departing from Neugarten’s definition here, I will use these four different dimensions and discuss how the young-old are positioned within these dimensions to find a working definition of the young-old for my study. I will discuss all of the dimensions in the following. Due to the nature of my research project, however, I will focus more strongly on the sociological and psychological dimensions.