Activity Theory, Disengagement Theory, and Successful Aging

Synonyms

Activity theory of aging; Disengagement theory of aging; Successful aging

Definitions

Interdisciplinary gerontological perspectives that attempt to explain why some individuals are better able to adapt to the challenges of aging than others.

Activity and disengagement theories of aging were the first to use social science data to explain why some individuals, or groups, are more adaptive or “successful” in meeting the multiple and inevitable challenges of aging than other persons. These theories for the first time focused on social, psychological, and interpersonal factors in addition to more observable physiological and medical conditions of aging. They also called attention to the positive and healthy aspects of aging rather than frailty, decline, and decrement – which was the focus at the time, not only of the medical establishment in geriatrics but also within social services and public policy for the aged. The debates following activity and disengagement theories changed scientific discourse, service delivery and policy in the decades following 1960, providing evidence of the power of theories to alter research and practice in gerontology.

Activity and disengagement theories were based on a developmental perspective applied to later life, a view that aging involved a progression from one stage to another rather than a decline from middle age to an end state. These theories also involved an interdisciplinary perspective on aging – based on medical/physiological data on age-related conditions, but also psychology, sociology, and later social work perspectives on functioning. These were immense contributions to the developing field of gerontology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Activity Theory of Aging

Activity is any “regulated or patterned action beyond routine physical or personal maintenance” (Lemon et al. 1972; Havighurst 1961). Types of activity include interaction with family and friends, participation in organizations, and more solitary recreational activities like reading, watching television, and doing household chores. The basic premise of activity theory of aging is that individuals should maintain the activities and orientations of middle age for as long as possible, and then find substitutes for those activities which they must give up as they age in order to maintain high life satisfaction in retirement (Havighurst 1961). According to the theory, active engagement in various new roles (e.g., taking up volunteer activities following retirement) is “successful adaptation” to aging.

Activity theory goes something like this: As people age they experience life events such as widowhood, failing health, and retirement that reduce participation in normative mid-life social roles. If uncompensated, these “role losses” lead to lower activity, which may result in lower life satisfaction and functional decline, particularly when the event, such as retirement, is not the individual’s choice. According to activity theory, people should find substitute roles for the work and parenting roles they left behind in mid-life in order to maintain their sense of self-worth. Active engagement in new social roles appropriate for older adults – volunteering, grandparenting – is further reinforced by cultural norms, fostering personal feelings of self-worth and higher life satisfaction in older age (Lemon et al. 1972; Havighurst 1961).

Activity theory was first proposed based on empirical evidence by Havighurst and Albrecht in their 1954 book, Older People (Havighurst and Albrecht 1953). Their data, drawn from the first large-scale American social survey of the elderly, showed that older adults who participated in appropriate social roles for the aged, like spending time with grandchildren and attending church, were happier and more adjusted in later life than those who were not similarly engaged in social roles. Thus, social engagement was seen as a causal factor in maintaining high levels of “adjustment,” or life satisfaction, in the later years.

Activity theory was labeled an “implicit” theory of aging (Havighurst 1961) because it naturally guided most medical and social work practice in the Post World War II era – and still does, to some extent, since it so well reflects American values of productivity and the desire to remain youthful (Bengtson and Kuypers 1971). Activity theory offered a conceptual justification underlying many programs for the elderly, influencing the passage of the Older Americans Act in 1965.

It was not until much later that a systematic empirical test of the theory was provided by Lemon, Bengtson and Peterson in 1972. They amplified the concepts and mechanisms of the theory and developed a set of axiomatic statements based on social theorist George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionist theory. These axioms articulated how activities provide role supports that help sustain positive self-concepts leading to higher life satisfaction. They postulated that the greater the activity level – formal social activities like participating in organizations, informal activities such as getting together with friends, or solitary activities such as reading – the greater the role support one will receive. The more role support one receives, the greater the contribution to a positive self-concept, leading, in turn, to higher life satisfaction in later life. Six hypotheses were derived from these axioms and tested with data. Only one – high levels of informal social activity such as with friends, family, and neighbors – was positively related to life satisfaction for elderly persons. Other activity types – high formal activity in organizations, for example; or high solitary mental activity such as reading – were not significantly related to life satisfaction (Lemon et al. 1972).

In 1982, Longino and Kart replicated the Lemon et al. (1972) study using a more socioeconomically diverse sample (to avoid its possible middle-class bias) and included more in-depth measures of activity (asking respondents to reconstruct the previous day’s activities from morning through bedtime). They found, again, that informal social activities with friends and family had a positive effect on life satisfaction in all socioeconomic groups, but that formal activities such as attending group meetings were negatively associated with life satisfaction. Solitary activities, like reading, writing and watching television, had no effect (Longino and Kart 1982).

Reitzes, Mutran, and Verrill extended activity theory using more direct measures of role support and examined whether certain activity types increase self-esteem in later life (Reitzes et al. 1995). Only leisure activities were positively associated with self-esteem. There were considerable gender differences mediating the relationships; that is, for men, solitary activities were significantly related to positive self-esteem, and for women, activities with relatives and work friends were significant as were other types of activities when commitment to the role was high.

Further support for Lemon et al.’s (1972) study of activity theory was found in an English context. Knapp (1977) found a significant relationship between informal activity (the hours per week spent with friends and family) and life satisfaction, but the association between formal activities and solitary activities with life satisfaction was weak (Knapp 1977). More recently Zaraneck and Chapeleski (2005) reported some support for the theory in a study of casino gambling as a social activity among urban elderly, although participants who visited the casino most frequently (monthly or more) reported poorer social support and less participation in other social activities than the infrequent gamblers (Zaranek and Chapleski 2005).

In short, it is surprising that so few empirical studies to date have tested the principal assertion of activity theory – that maintaining levels of socio-emotional engagement is associated with a sense of life satisfaction among older individuals. This is the basis of the activity theory of aging, yet only engagement in informal activities has received sufficient empirical support, suggesting that different forms of activity have a different impact on life satisfaction. Despite lack of robust evidence for all types of activity participation, this perspective is still the predominant view of how to age successfully in the United States. Activity theory fits well with American cultural values (Keep active! Be productive!) and has received new life in recent years within the much-publicized “successful aging” paradigm reviewed at the end of this chapter.

Disengagement Theory

In Growing Old (1961), Elaine Cumming and William E. Henry described disengagement as, “An inevitable mutual withdrawal or disengagement, resulting in decreased interaction between the aging person and others in the social systems he belongs to” (Cumming and Henry 1961). This was the first formal attempt to explain normal or “successful” late life development from a perspective that combined psychodynamics with social systems analysis in the tradition of Durkheim and Talcott Parsons. Adults who disengaged were viewed as well adjusted; those who did not were social “impingers” (Cumming 1963).

The ideas of disengagement theory were first articulated by Cumming and Henry in 1959, a few years after they had joined Havighurst’s University of Chicago team. Cumming, a sociologist, and Henry, a psychoanalyst, developed their concepts while analyzing data from Havighurst’s Kansas City Study of Adult Life, an interdisciplinary community-based investigation to examine health, employment, leisure, and civic participation activities of older adults (Achenbaum and Bengtson 1994).

The concept of disengagement reflected Durkheimian functionalist theory by way of Talcott Parsons, which was the reigning theoretical paradigm in American sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. According to disengagement theory, as individuals age there is a gradual but inevitable constriction in “social life space,” evidenced by declines in the number of social partners and frequency of social interactions. At the same time there is withdrawal from social institutions (transition from work to retirement). Disengagement, therefore, is functional for both the social system and for the individual: It prepares society for the loss of the individual through the disengagements of retirement and then death; it prepares the individual for death through progressive disengagement from society (role loss). Thus, through this process of mutual withdrawal there is no disruption to the social equilibrium (Cumming and Henry 1961; Cumming 1963; Achenbaum and Bengtson 1994).

According to Cumming and Henry, disengagement is partially explained by older adults’ internalization of Western cultural values that esteem youth over age – primarily vitality, productivity, and efficiency. Withdrawal is thus regarded as an obligation to the functional maintenance of the social system because it allows younger generations to replace older adults in positions of increasing power and importance. Disengagement is also caused by increasing physical frailty and by psychological changes involving a greater interiority of experiencing – a psychic turning inward. According to Growing Old, the process is inevitable, irreversible, and universal – it happens to older people in all cultures and throughout all time periods (Cumming and Henry 1961).

The reception disengagement theory received from the gerontological community was immediate – and negative, particularly among sociologists. Maddox (1964) criticized Cumming and Henry’s claim that disengagement theory is intrinsic and inevitable, noting the considerable variability between study participants in the indicators of psychological and social disengagement once age was held constant (Maddox 1964). Rose (1964) was concerned with the ethnocentric assumption that disengagement is universal across societies and across time. He contended that disengagement emerged as a function of American culture, arising from Western trends in longevity and institutions like Social Security that created a new and special role for the aged (Rose 1964). Neugarten (1969) herself a part of the University of Chicago research team but who was critical of her colleagues’ psychoanalytic focus, suggested that disengagement theory ignored the heterogeneity of older people noting that the Kansas City panel was comprised largely of White, upper-middle class adults. She also claimed that disengagement theory discounted the impact of social status and social structure on the aging experience (Neugarten 1969). Bengtson (1969) questioned the functionalist assumptions of the universalistic processes of disengagement. Using data from a subsequent University of Chicago cross-national study of aging directed by Havighurst and Neugarten, Bengtson showed that disengagement was not universal across societies nor across occupational groups of retirees. Instead, there were a variety of socio-emotional activity patterns – some high, some low – that linked to high levels life satisfaction (Bengtson 1969).

Fifteen years after its initial statement, the debate over disengagement theory was still going strong. Hochschild (1975) presented a conceptual critique, arguing that disengagement theory was non-falsifiable – individuals who didn’t disengage were simply labeled “unsuccessful” and maladjusted, rather than considered as counter evidence to the theory. In addition, disengagement theory presents a deterministic view of successful aging. It assumes that if older adults willingly disengage, that this is advantageous to both them and to society (Hochschild 1975).

This barrage of criticism left disengagement theory with few researchers who appeared motivated to test or modify the theory further, and the term disengagement theory appears very seldom in current gerontological research literature. However, its development represented an important historic milestone in gerontology. As a theory, as an explanation for normal human aging, it was parsimonious, data driven, and logically explicit – in short, scientific. The upshot of the disengagement theory is that it set the stage for the formulation of other gerontological theories (Achenbaum and Bengtson 1994), most notably Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen 1995), which represents in some respects a logical extension of disengagement theory. Carstensen (1995) noted that the declines and withdrawals were not universal across all realms of engagement, but rather selective as older people decided where to place their emotional bets and where to cut their losses. This involved socioemotional selectivity, a process by which older people optimize coping strategies (Carstensen 1995).

Successful Aging as a Concept or Theory

In 1961, Robert Havighurst published a journal article that introduced the term “successful aging” to the gerontological literature (Havighurst 1961); 28 years later, John Rowe and Robert Kahn published their immensely-successful book by the same title, Successful Aging (Rowe and Kahn 1998). Havighurst’s conception of successful aging is reflected in the “activity theory” summarized above (Lemon et al. 1972; Havighurst 1961). Many of these same ideas are reflected in Rowe and Kahn’s formulations for successful aging (Rowe and Kahn 1987, 1998).

Rowe and Kahn (1998) argued that most research on aging normalizes the disease process as a natural part of growing old but does not sufficiently account for differences in lifestyle, nutrition, exercise, social support, and social structure that moderate the effects of aging and determine the extent to which a person becomes disabled or ill. They classified normal aging as either usual or successful. In usual aging, extrinsic factors such as poor diet, lack of exercise, and poverty accelerate the effects of aging alone; whereas in successful aging, extrinsic factors play a neutral or positive role. These two pathways are differentiated by extrinsic factors only; Rowe and Kahn argue that there are no intrinsic factors innately linked to chronological age. In other words, disease and disability are age related, not age dependent.

Rowe and Kahn (1998) suggest that the three components of successful aging are (1) avoiding disease, (2) engagement with life, and (3) maintaining high physical and mental functioning. A person can meet these three criteria by eating healthy foods, exercising regularly, and remaining socially and intellectually active through close interpersonal relationships and productive activities that provide meaning to the older person. A major tenet of the successful aging paradigm is that aging is plastic; that is, individuals have the capacity to modify their aging trajectory through changes in lifestyle, nutrition, and other behaviors.

While Rowe and Kahn (1998) emphasize activity and social engagement as components of successful aging, they do not acknowledge Havighurst’s prior theoretical work in activity theory nor the empirical work that failed to support activity theory. They also fail to explicitly discuss the contributions of disengagement theory, or how social structures and economic forces act to expand or constrict an individual’s ability to age successfully according to their three principles. These are agendas for future work on the “successful aging” paradigm.

Rowe and Kahn’s work transcended the academic community and was immensely popular among general audiences. A major contribution of their ideas is that they explicitly linked sociological and psychological processes to biological outcomes: an expansion of Havighurst’s early conception of “successful aging.” Also, Rowe and Kahn’s ideas reflect the growing focus on life course theories of aging, including cumulative advantage/disadvantage theories that guide much of the research on individual aging today.

Conclusion

Activity theory, disengagement theory, and successful aging advanced the field of gerontology in important ways. First, all three perspectives focus attention on normative and positive aging, rather than aging as a disease. In the 1960s, disengagement and activity theories shifted the medical/physiological focus on human aging to research exploring the social and emotional lives of older adults. Decades later, Rowe and Kahn’s successful aging paradigm combined the biological aspects of aging with psychosocial factors, thereby advancing interdisciplinary perspectives on aging and promoting the application of life course and developmental theories to gerontology.

Whereas the scientific community quickly dismissed disengagement theory, the principles of activity theory – mainly that older adults should stay active to remain satisfied with life – gained momentum and influence much of the research on aging today. Activity and successful aging theories profoundly influenced public policy and the development of health and social services for the aged. The ideas also guide popular discourse on how people can “successfully” adapt to the changes associated with aging, reflected in our culture’s persistent desire to remain fit, productive, and mentally sharp. In addition to shaping policy, disengagement, activity, and successful aging theories helped establish gerontology as a discipline and older age as a unique stage of life.