Major Social Theories of Aging and their Implications for Counseling Concepts and Practice

Abstract

The article discusses the counseling implications and applications of a number of social theories of aging. It explores the effects of some of the rather distinct perspectives on aging that have emerged, beginning with the conceptualizations, research studies, and criticisms of disengagement theory, activity theory, and role theory, leading up to continuity theory and the liberation perspective. The social theory approaches to aging and the resulting empirical studies examined here have affinities with some of the existing perspectives of counseling concepts and counseling practice. The focus is on counseling perspectives aimed at helping elderly individuals maintain a satisfactory state of psychological well-being. Particular attention is given to the reciprocal influences among social systems, individual resources, and counselor effects in helping elderly clients cope with differential demands, internal pressures, and external constraints of the social environment. An integrative framework proposing conceptual links among individual resources, social resources, and life satisfactions in old age is presented. The discussion is devoted to persuading counseling psychologists and mental health practitioners that individuals age differently and by differing processes. The issues of heterogeneity in the aging processes, the modifiability of these processes, and choices in constructing alternative futures for older persons make it possible for counseling researchers and counseling psychologists to consider aging individuals as synergistic products of ecological, biological, psychosocial, and cultural factors.