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Putting a Human Face on Gerontological Research: Identity Issues

Editor, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences

IN STEPHEN King's Dark Tower series, Roland, the Gunslinger, often warns individual members of his small circle of followers "not to forget the face of their fathers." This is not bad advice to give gerontologists. It is easy for those of us who are engaged in gerontological research to lose sight of the humanity behind the numbers.

It is an amazing experience to count the number of papers published in the social science part of this journal that are drawn from analyses of large data sets, often panel studies, conducted by others. The authors have never looked in the eyes of one of the research subjects and asked a question. We have become mass consumers of secondary data. The respondents, those in the sample, are faceless abstractions. They seem to have no identities. In this circumstance, we tend to lose sight of the person and instead manipulate categories and levels: disability, poverty, marital status, race, and so on. Perhaps that is the nature of most social science research.

There is a loss, however, when we forget the human faces behind the data. Perhaps this is the reason that the covers of The Gerontologist always feature a face, usually a mature, experienced, even weathered face. Unfortunately, it is very easy to forget that people do not live in data sets. They live in "fields of experience" that phenomenologists call "life worlds," and their own understandings of who they really are, their identities, shift daily in response to shifts in their audiences, circumstances, and concerns. The faces they expose to the world also shift.

Simon Biggs, in the lead article in this issue, provides a theoretical understanding of aging and identity, and he discusses some potential sources of research bias. I would encourage you to read it.

Professor Biggs also helps us to clarify the need to encourage both quantitative and qualitative studies on the same research topics. The life worlds of the subjects expose themselves to us more confidently in qualitative research, which, in turn, offers the context for richer interpretations of quantitative research. Both qualitative and quantitative research are welcomed at this journal.

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