Bernice Neugarten

"Social scientists are interested in two broad themes or aspects of . The first is how any society functions as an age structure and how changing over time affect economic, political, and other aspects of social organization. The second is how attitudes and roles change over the life cycle of the individual or in cohorts of individuals."

"The of are rapidly changing, thereby altering the traditional relations between age groups. Some observers think ageism is increasing in the United States; others, that it is decreasing. In either case, stereotypes of old age are now changing with the rise of the young-old—that is, the age group 55 to 75, who constitute 15 percent of the population—who are relatively healthy, relatively affluent, relatively free from traditional responsibilities of work and family and who are increasingly well educated and politically active. This group will develop a variety of new needs with regard to meaningful use of time and for maximizing the opportunities for both self-enhancement and community participation. The young-old have enormous potential as agents of social change in creating an age-irrelevant society and in thus improving the relations between age groups."

"Age is an underlying dimension of social organization, for in all societies the relations between individuals and between groups are regulated by age difference. Thus far, however, little systematic attention has been paid by sociologists or social psychologists to the ways in which age groups relate to each other in modern complex societies, to age-grading, to relations between generations, of to systems of norms which govern ."

"Studies of human behavior in different societies have helped the social scientist understand the relations between culture and personality and have helped him shake free his hypotheses about human behavior from particular sets of cultural biases. These points are as important in studying middle age and aging as in studying child development."

"The terminal phase of the life cycle is receiving increased attention from social scientists. While this may be caused by the student interested in the sociology of knowledge, it is nevertheless striking that in the past few years there has been a sudden multiplication of studies of perceptions of time, finitude, attitudes toward death, and other psychological and sociological aspects of death and dying (an interest which is reflected also in the professional literature of physicians, psychiatrists, nurses, and s)."