Growing Old- Constructed by Age

    As our rapidly growing, changing, and aging society continues to affect our lives, culture and norms, emerging issues and theories to answer questions related to the study of aging and society warrant critical attention. Aging or ageing is the accumulation of changes (mainly decline) in a person over time. Subjective aging refers to how people experience their process of growing old and includes both cognitive judgments and emotional reactions. The current study is to investigate how an individual’s growing old is socially constructed by age (age marking and age regulating) and what kind of aging has been constructed. Age marking is the process of using age as an identifier of the beginning, level and trend of individual’s aging, and age regulating is the process of using age as a tool for regulation of senior citizens.
    To describe what kind of subjective aging was constructed by ages,   a qualitative study was employed to explore old people’s lived experience of aging. Conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 older informants ranging in age from the early 60s to the late 90s. The author spoke with the participants alone in their own homes or in nursing homes for two 60–120 min sessions. Two were seen for 3 sessions. All records were transcribed into texts which were then imported into Nvivo 10.0 where the texts were analyzed based on phenomenological analysis and grounded theory. 294 primary nodes and 794 references were generated by open coding and then were classified into 19 secondary nodes by axial coding; By selective coding, 18 secondary nodes, consisting of 287 primary nodes and 769 references, were finally selected and then were categorized into 5 tertiary nodes. Describable validity, interpretive validity and commentative validity were 5, 4.77, 4.38 respectively by adopting respondent validation. Theory and reflexivity validation were as means of validating the results, as well.
    Results demonstrated that four mental states of aging,...