Disengagement Research Paper

Words: 604
Pages: 3

In real world, most of us have experiences on interacting with elderly. While the occasion of interactions are different for many people, we can still conclude that elderly can socialize. However, from the readings we did for this week, it stressed that there is a level of disengagement within the elderly community, isolated from/ by society, creating conflicts with my own observation on elderly behavior. The first two essays I've read are about disengagement theory. First reading explained disengagement theory. Dr. Cumming developed this theory and used it to predict disengagement and mutual withdrawal between elderly and society. Upon his study, he chose his participants carefully. He picked individuals between the ages of 50 to 90 and had …show more content…
He excluded elderly with lower income, inability to be independent, and elderly with physical or mental illness from rest of his studies group. Cumming denied the conception of disengagement is based ill health, and that studies on lower income elderly were considered unhelpful. In second essay, Arnold M. Rose helped explaining the disengagement theory by stating that "disengagement is inevitable, because death is inevitable"(Rose 41). It also help clarified that the theory suggests that each side, society and elderly, are preparing in advance for death, so when it comes, when they die, they would have been readied. In this book, he also mentioned 3 important criticism for it. First of all, modern technology changes and people now have longer life expectancy, now there are more healthy elderly and it will increase the participants population compare to the original scales, so the variable for the study increased. Also, it was shown that when Dr. Cumming chose his participant, most of the time, the disengaged elderly he found were disengaged before the study was executed. The next criticism is