Abstract
Gerontology together with its subfields, such as social gerontology (sociology of ageing), geragogy, educational gerontology, political gerontology, environmental gerontology, and financial gerontology, is still a relatively new academic discipline that is currently intensively developing, expanding research fields and combining various theoretical and practical perspectives. The interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity of research on ageing and old age, despite its vast thematic, methodological and theoretical diversity, have a common denominator, which is the focus of research work on improving the quality of life of older people (see Fabiś et al., 2015). It is the concern for the components of quality of life such as welfare and well-being as well as focus on learning about phenomena conditioning successful ageing that has become motivators and premises hidden or visible in many texts included in the Research Topic Perspectives and Theories of Social Innovation for Ageing Population. The Research Topic that we are presenting to our readers is unique not only because of its size but above all because of its novelty and social involvement, visible in the content of individual chapters. The presented collection includes 17 articles prepared in total by 76 authors from the following countries: China, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Two journals were combined with this Research Topic: Frontiers in Public Health and Frontiers in Sociology. The presented Research Topic contains seven types of articles covering: two community case studies (Brown et al.; Pinzon-Pulido et al.), eight original research articles (Berde; Bjursell; Dovie; Senior; Spinelli et al.; Stypinska et al.; Wanka; Zhang and Yang), two perspective articles (Aoo et al.; Piel and Robra), one hypothesis and theory paper (Toczyski et al.), one policy and practice review (Tziraki-Segal et al.), one methods article (Ramovs et al.), and two book reviews (Cieśla; Leszko).
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Sociological Theory, a section of the journal Frontiers in Sociology
Both new research areas and innovative, practical solutions are determined by the culturally diverse perception of old age and various public interventions in individual countries undergoing the ageing of the population
The authors, intentionally selecting the topics presented above, show the directions in which gerontology could develop. These are both new perspectives in the “soft” areas, e.g., educational, interpersonal relationships, self-improvement, and strengthening of activity, as well as in the “hard” areas when it comes to information and communications technologies (ICTs) and medical, economic, or biological issues
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Sociological Theory, a section of the journal Frontiers in Sociology. The rationale to start work on this set of texts was the desire to continue and deepen the research analyses of the editors of this set, which concern the development of social innovations for the ageing population as well as changes of public policy on ageing (the ageing policy) (see Klimczuk, 2015, 2017; Tomczyk and Klimczuk, 2015) This Research Topic deals with topics covering issues such as social learning, intergenerational transmission, senior entrepreneurship, creative content creation by older adults, care services, raising the independence of older people in their living environments, dementia challenges, the image of the older generation in local social policies, new trends in qualitative research on old age, strategies for dealing with chronic diseases, the use of digital tools in health education, the silver economy/longevity economy, age-friendly environments, the. One such example can be seen in an article whose authors (Toczyski et al.) combine crystallized knowledge of older people with issues related to minimizing digital exclusion
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