Exploring Age and Aging Via the Life Course Perspective: A Filipino Perspective

Aging is a natural and universal human phenomenon.  It is natural as it is part of the human biological process and universal as it exempts no one, across time and space.  The naturalness and universality of the aging process indicate a spectrum of how human beings experience it.  It is both a collective and an individual experience, at the same time.  As individuals add on years to their lives, the population also ages.  This brings to mind the famous sociologist C. W. Mills’ (1959) position that a person’s biography is linked with world history.  The sociological imagination, the frame of mind that Mills believes could enable one to understand the said linkage, reminds us to look into how social structures bear on one’s personal life, how personal troubles can become public issues.

The institutionalized life course as conceptualized by Kohli (2007) lends a distinct tool in understanding how external forces such as social institutions, social structures and cultural elements interact with each other and with society’s individual members thereby predicting actions and promoting relative stability.  How age and the aging process along its four given dimensions (chronological, biological, psychological and social) are understood by the older persons themselves given their current situation as a senior citizen, is the problem focused on in this study.

            The normative system of how to plan and live one’s life as defined by the institutionalized life course is implicated in how the elderly Filipino older persons (60 years old and above, men and women) understand the phenomenon of aging.  Selected older Filipino participants in a qualitative study that utilizes narrative gerontology as a methodological tool tell their stories as to what life domains they consider as significant and how they compartmentalize life accordingly.