ABSTRACT
Seniors are one of the population segments in many developed nations. According to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), it is projected that by 2050 one in five Americans will be aged 65 or older (American Association of Retired Persons, 1998; Federal Interagency Forum on Aging Related Statistics, 2000). For other countries this ratio is even higher: one in four for France and Germany, and one in three for Greece, Italy, Spain, and Japan (United Nations Population Division, 2001, 2002). Because of improved economic status and access to health care, seniors now remain healthy and active for a longer time (Rothman, 2000). As their numbers grow and they remain actively involved in their communities, seniors will become increasingly important as witnesses to crimes, accidents, and transactions. For this reason, seniors’ abilities as eyewitnesses have begun to receive more attention from psycho-legal researchers in recent years. In this chapter we first consider definitional issues and discuss some criminological findings on the victimization of older adults. We then describe developmental changes related to aging that are pertinent to eyewitness situations and review research focusing on older adults’ performance as eyewitnesses. We conclude that although a great deal of promising work has been done in the past decade, much more needs to be done to determine which subgroups of the elderly present reliability risks, which techniques can offset such deficits, and which questions provide the most promise for future research.
