Resumo

CURCIO BORRERO, Carmen Lucía. RESEARCH AND AGING: FROM DATA TO THEORY. Hacia promoc. Salud [online]. 2010, vol.15, n.1, pp.144-166. ISSN 0121-7577.

Introduction: the scientific study of aging began after World War II, therefore it is younger than its object of study. Gerontology was born amidst structural-functionalism, and from its beginnings it has been a functionalist gerontology, characterized by the dominance of an empirical and applied dimension, in which the methods have led the way of development, as well as concentrating on the intervention problems and places. Even though it began among the interstices of biological, medical, psychological and social sciences, gerontology's explanatory reference frames particularly come from biology and psychology. Objective: carry out a critical analysis of the current state of the theoretical development of gerontology. Materials and methods: more than five thousand publications on the topic were identified, including articles, editorials, documents and books, published since the 1960's. The articles and documents were reviewed using their abstracts in order to determine their relation to the topic, while the table of contents was used for books. Finally 254 publications were used in the present analysis. Results: five important aspects can be considered in the development of gerontology theories: in first place, it originates from problems. Secondly, it has developed without a course based on the empirical evidence (empiric and a-theoretical pragmatism), therefore it has been centered on accumulating empirical generalizations. Thirdly, in the struggle to obtain a disciplinary status, it sometimes goes against its interdisciplinary nature, which leads to the fourth aspect, the complexity of its object of study. Finally, another difficulty that gerontology has faced is its origin among a paradigm change from modernity to post-modernity, amid the tension between explanatory and causal focuses vs. the comprehensive and interpretative focuses, in a society that desires post-modernity, but in reality maintains many modern schemes. Conclusion: since biology and psychology are closer to natural sciences, it has had an extraordinary progress in the last couple of years: positivism is still present, and it's still producing high-quality and high impact knowledge. Progress has been difficult for social gerontology, in part due to the fact that social phenomena are considerably more complex and dynamic, and that researches focus their studies and theories with different perspectives.

Palavras-chave : Gerontology; theories; research; aging; old age.

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