SELF-CONCEPTION OF THE AGED : A SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

With the world becoming a global village based predominantly on the capitalistic structure generally, productivity receives top priority and often glorified. As a result, the so-called old people who have ceased to be productive in the economic sense are viewed as part of the social problems leading to an ageing society. Here, it is common political discourse that we often heard of how much a burden can all these old people be on the nation resources. Under the above context, the primary moving force for this thesis is compassion for the aged as well as personal identification with one of sociology's main objective - to champion for the underdogs. In this research, because a person's occupation or profession (work role) represents one of the most important features of that person's self-concept, my principal here deals with understanding the process of how an aged person develops a self-concept when he or she retires given that the role of an aged in modern society is unclear. This transition from a valued work role to a socially devalued role, that of retirement, represents one of the most important status passages in an individual's life course. In this process of negotiating a self-concept via clarity of an aged's role, this research seeks to understand how would one's socio-economic resources affect the transition and hence the eventual self-concept. Briefly, self-concept is chosen as a research topic because it is understudied and that one's action originates from the way one see him or herself. In addition, gerontological studies has often focused on their needs and problems which, in my view, follows a social welfare tradition and nonetheless the starting point of these studies, very ironically, view these old people in a negative light; as part of the "social problems". In addition, research on the aged often adopts a quantitative framework in order to assess their satisfaction with life, morale, self esteem, self concept and their interrelationship with variables such as health, living arrangement, educational level, economic status etc (See Palmore, 1979; Reddick, 1985; Stone, 1985; Yeo, 1983). It is with the above plentiful quantitative and social welfare studies in mind that I undertake to explore an under investigated dimension in research on aging. In contrast to the quantitative studies, a qualitative study will complement the existing quantitative work by providing new insights and suggest deeper humanistic understanding of the aged's self concept. As such, I will attempt to elicit in the aged person's own words his or her life history. Thus, this study has a qualitative design~ in-depth interviews will be conducted with a sample of 20 aged who were at least of 60 years of age as this is the official retirement age in Singapore. The fact that "all humans arc unique and develop in an individual way highlights that the need for in-depth studies should be a priority for researchers (Ford; 1988:2)." In sum, my thesis aims to adopt a symbolic interactionistic framework to provide a sociological perspective on the aged individual's negotiation for a self-concept. One noted point is that this research does not focus on the problems of old age but rather view old age as a social phenomenon where different individuals are involved in different ways to negotiate and socially construct their self-concept.