ABSTRACT
Social gerontology, as a developing field of study, has to advance on a number of fronts. One constant need is for new substantive field studies. No less important is the need for conceptual refinement and theoretical advance. Writers on the elderly frequently make use of concepts such as ‘dependency’, ‘morale’ and ‘loneliness’, but these are only infrequently subject to discussion and clarification. The relationships between concepts and their operational definition – the way in which they are actually measured in the field – are seldom reviewed. Here I hope to make a contribution to our understanding of the concept of ‘dependency’ and, most crucially, to sketch an approach to a theory of independence, by a sympathetic critique of the important article with which the journal Ageing and Society was launched: Peter Townsend’s, (1981) ‘The Structured Dependency of the Elderly: a Creation of Social Policy in the Twentieth Century.’
