Becoming Our Subject Matter:Emerging Concepts, New Methods and Self-Reflexivity over the Aging Career

“Those of us who study aging have the unique opportunity to live their subject matter” (Hendricks, 2008). With the aging of their lives and careers, sociologists of aging and social gerontologists increasingly employ self-reflexivity and related retrospective and prospective methodological tools (including re-analysis and re-interpretation of earlier research findings) to advance knowledge and understanding of aging and later life. Reflexive and self-reflexive approaches provide unique methodological lenses: the aging of self, changes in the field – emergence of concepts (eg., caregiving) and methodologies (eg., interdisciplinarity) - that shape what we ‘see’ as researchers.

This presentation situates these methodologies in the work of several prominent sociologist of aging, including Hagestad’s (1996) reflections on continuity and discontinuity from an illness perspective, and Hendricks’ (2008) challenge to us to consider how our scholarly efforts and our experience come together in ways that enrich one or the other and how we integrate what we know with how we live. It builds also on special issues of the Journal of Aging Studies (‘Critical gerontologists reflect on their own aging’, 2008) and The Gerontologist (“Aging: It’s Personal”, 2017).

In particular, this presentation interrogates Hendricks’ (2008) observation that “personal experience can make us far better scholars than can scholarship alone”. This interweave of the personal and the professional in ways that are unique to us as sociologists of aging, has two foci: (a) how learnings from the lived experience of aging have prompted review and revision of my earlier research on home care; (b) observed over a 45-year career, the import and impact of the emergence of concepts framing our analyses (eg., caregiving, co-longevity, ambivalence) and of methodologies (eg., inter/ transciplinarity, longitudinal datasets, internationally comparative, social media).