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Editorial: Contexts of Aging

The request to write an editorial on a set of articles brings with it a challenge to find a theme that connects the work of a group of authors who wrote their articles independently of each other. Fortunately, finding the theme to weave together a discussion of the six papers in this volume of the journal was not difficult. All are about contexts of aging. It is only recently that we have come to appreciate the importance of the settings in which older people live their lives. Our traditions are much more naive. For a long time we viewed aging as a period of inevitable decline. Phrases like "what can you expect at your age" or "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" emerged from this understanding of aging. Subsequently, concerns about ageism led us to a period of immense optimism about the possibilities that come with age. The CBC program "It's About Time" exemplified that era. In that program we were presented with images of seniors who spent their time skydiving, mountain climbing, running marathons and operating multinational corporations. Phrases like "you're not getting older, you're getting better" typified this understanding of aging. Yet it was clear that neither image accurately reflected the lives of very many Canadian seniors. We now recognize that seniors are a heterogeneous group of people who have had six or more decades of diverse experiences and time to develop their values, beliefs and idiosyncrasies. They are more unlike one another than are people in any other age group. And we have begun to explore the complexities of the ways in which they differ. One approach to understanding this diversity has been to examine the interactions between seniors and the various environments in which they live their lives. This ecological approach to understanding human experience and behaviour is the paradigm that informs my research and teaching in Human Ecology. Some of the assumptions of this paradigm are that people live in a set of physical and interpersonal environments; that people are influenced by and in turn have an influence upon these environments; that the relative importance of environments differs across individuals and for the same individual across time. For several years, I have been thinking about how to conceptualize the key environments of older people. I see six environments or contexts that are particularly important in understanding the lives of older people. These can be viewed as concentric circles, with closest environments having the most direct relevance to the older person. At the centre is the personal environment, comprising the individual's characteristics such as functional and cognitive status and personal resources such as income. These characteristics provide the opportunities and constraints on interaction with