ABSTRACT
In a survey of attitudes towards the prospect of Britain adopting the euro, 61 per cent of those aged 65+ were against this, compared with 32 per cent of those aged 25-34. Such data are routinely presented as evidence of the inherently conservative nature of older people. From this an inference is drawn to suggest that it is the process of ageing which has brought about the politically, economically and socially conservative views implied here. This leads to the conclusion that, upon entry to old age, we will all become socially and politically conservative regardless of our previous social or political beliefs. Using this line of argument social and political conservatism is seen as being constructed as a universal and inevitable aspect of the `social' component of the ageing process. Similarly social commentators and the media often produce reports of the relationship between diet, such as eating yoghurt, and the longevity of populations. It is the prime function of the gerontologist to look critically at such suggestions and to draw conclusions as to the veracity of such claims. Hence the major focus of the study of gerontology, or ageing, is to identify and understand how and why individuals (or societies) age and to look critically at any such factors that are hypothesised as demonstrating the effect of ageing or factors which are proposed as `causing' ageing. These deceptively simple goals are fraught with methodological challenges and this chapter concentrates upon the problems posed by the study of ageing, in which age is taken as the independent variable, and upon the techniques used to respond to these challenges. However, all of the issues such as the importance of clearly defining study populations or maximising response rates, which characterise other social science research, also apply to the study of ageing and later life and readers are referred to the standard research methods literature for these (Bowling et al., 2002). The focus of this chapter is upon the special challenges of gerontological research and working with older people. There are now several texts concerned specifically with research in social gerontology (Lawton and Herzog, 1989; Peace, 1990; Wallace and Woolson, 1992; Jamieson and Victor, 2002) where further details about the major methodological issues pertinent to the study of ageing may be found and which serve to complement and enhance the points raised in this chapter.
