ABSTRACT
The vast majority of studies of aging use a chronological approach to define populations for research purposes and try to establish how characteristics of people change as a function of their chronological age. An exploration of the implicit concepts of time and aging appears not only to be important for most individual disciplines which study aging, but is certainly relevant for the interdisciplinary pretensions of the endeavor called gerontology. Jon Hendricks and C. B. Peters, building on earlier work by Maltz and Riegel, distinguished chronological, individual, social, and ideational time; and parallel with these, inner/biological, individual/psychological, cultural/sociological, and outer/physical dimensions of time. Generalizations about people with a certain calendar age actually presuppose a causal concept of time: because time has worked for a certain duration in aged people, certain inevitable effects should be reckoned with. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts in this book.
