ABSTRACT
The tenets of interpretive social science lead directly to the relationship between research questions and methodological questions. For the sociologist, the societal context is of paramount significance, for it is not only that older people are different from each other, but that the very processes of aging are different in different societies, in different subgroups, at different points in history; so that aging is social destiny as well as biological destiny. Nature of social aging, whether for one or both sexes, has seldom been discussed by sociologists, in contrast to the wide-ranging debates among biologists over the definitions and the competing theories of biological aging. Although this relationship is fundamental to all disciplines, it is in the limelight among sociologists these days, to judge from the heated interchanges now appearing in the sociological journals. A review of the sociological research on the life course indicates that patterns of role transitions across historical time have been explored mainly through intercohort comparisons.
