More Than Theory

Abstract

A randomly drawn sample of 535 empirical articles representing 50% of the papers published between 1990 and 1994 and between 2000 and 2004 in Psychology and Aging and the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences were analyzed based on a newly developed coding scheme. This instrument allowed us to systematically evaluate types and contents of geropsychological theoretical entities used. We found that theoretical entity use significantly increased from 66.3% to 82.0%, which is much higher than only coding the material according to the explicit use of “theory,” as we have found in previous work (30% versus 44%, respectively; Drapaniotis, Neubauer, & Wahl, 2013 ). We also observed that even the most extensively cited entities, i.e., the mental-slowing hypothesis, the inhibitory-deficit hypothesis, and socioemotional selectivity theory, were cited in only a rather limited number of articles. We conclude that the field of geropsychology relies on a wide and quite heterogeneous array of theoretical entities.