9.1 Chapter Overview and Learning Objectives
Ethical Standards for Human Services Professionals
Standard 27: Human service professionals must accurately represent their qualifications, encompassing, but not limited to, their skills, education, credentials, training, and areas of expertise, to the client, colleagues, and members of the public. When any intentional or accidental misrepresentation is discovered, they must take immediate action to rectify the situation. (NOHS, 2024).
What does it mean to get older? Some define age as an issue of physical health, while others simply define it by chronological years. In the United States, for example, turning 65 years old is a significant milestone, at which point citizens are eligible for federal benefits such as Social Security and Medicare. However, more recent methods of looking at the aging population consider how much life expectancy the population has remaining (United Nations, 2020). This interest in aging has led to the development of the interdisciplinary field of study known as gerontology. Gerontology not only includes the physical aspects of aging (the medical field focused on aging is called geriatrics), but psychosocial, economic, spiritual, and other factors as well.
In this chapter, we discuss the various concerns facing older adults and their families, and the services available to assist them. We combine a gerontological perspective, multigenerational homes, and an equity lens at the center of it all.
Learning Objectives
- Summarize the role of developmental theory in the study of aging.
- Identify the current issues related to the aging population.
- Recognize the current challenges facing older adults.
- Compare and contrast the major social programs currently serving older adults.
Key Terms
Key terms are important vocabulary for understanding the content of the chapters. They will be bolded and defined via an in-text glossary the first time that they appear in the chapter.
Key terms for this chapter are:
- Ageism: a set of fixed beliefs about a specific age group that they have limits or certain capacities based on their age
- Baby boomers: the cohort of people born in the years after World War II, generally including those born between 1946 and 1964
- Beanpole family structure: the modern family structure of having fewer children in each generation, as well as each generation living longer, resulting in a chronologically long but narrow structure
- Caregiving, formal: a professional who is paid to assist with activities of daily living
- Caregiving, informal: an unpaid layperson (often a family member) who assists with a wide variety of daily needs
- Cumulative advantage or disadvantage: the processes by which the effects of early economic, educational, and other deficiencies or resources can accumulate over the life course, with these becoming magnified over the life span
- Dependency ratio: the number of citizens who are unable to work due to age or disability compared to those who can work
- Formal Caregivers: Professionals paid to provide such services (these can start as family or friend members but not if this is a profession also)
- Gerontology: the interdisciplinary study of aging, including biological, psychological, social, economic, and spiritual perspectives, among others
- Grandfamilies: where grandparents or great-grandparents provide the primary care for their grandchildren
- Informal Caregivers: Friends or family members who provide unpaid care (this can also be neighbors’ support and cultural expectations)
- Life expectancy: the average number of years a person born today may expect to live
- Loneliness is the discrepancy between the social contact a person has and the contacts a person wants
- Medicaid: the joint federal- and state-sponsored program aimed at providing medical care to lower income individuals
- Medicare: the federal health care program in the United States provided to adults 65 and older as well as disabled citizens
- Multigenerational families: where more than two generations live together
- Older Americans Act: the federal legislation, originally enacted in 1965, that authorizes a majority of community services for older adults, including community centers and nutrition programs
- Stereotype embodiment theory (SET) posits that the more a person is exposed to ageist messages, the more likely they are to believe—and demonstrate—these messages
- Social Security Act: a federal program established in 1935 to provide protection against poverty to older Americans
- Silver tsunami: a term used to describe the skewing of the population toward older ages
Licenses and Attributions
“Chapter Overview and Learning Objectives” by Yvonne M. Smith LCSW is adapted from “Who Are the Elderly? Aging in Society” in Introduction to Sociology 2e by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang, OpenStax. License: CC BY 4.0. Revised by Martha Ochoa-Leyva.
Figure 9.1. Photo by Nappy is in the Public domain.
