Healthy Aging among Immigrants in Sweden: What We Know and Need to Find Out

Abstract

The second approach to successful aging studies focuses not on the “what” of successful aging but rather on the “how”—that is, on the strategies people use to age well (e.g., Baltes & Baltes, 1990). Studies of successful aging that focus on strategies can be regarded as attempts to overcome some of the problems associated with the normative focus on outcomes described earlier. Proponents of this approach believe that it is problematic to defi ne successful aging in terms of objective outcomes that only a few older people can achieve, which is why they argue that a shift in focus is necessary if we are to allow the heterogeneity of older people to guide our understandings of what it means to age well (Baltes & Carstensen, 1996). Thus, their focus is not on what constitutes successful aging per se but on how older people go about achieving a successful old age despite the various increasing limitations in resources that growing old can entail. Researchers working from this perspective tend to focus on the strategies of selective optimization with compensation, which have been proposedas the key to aging well, and on identifying the various outcomes that are associated with them (such as well-being, positive emotions, and absence of feelings of loneliness).