Trends in Gero-Psychological Research

Abstract

Inspired by Birren’s now-classic statement that gerontology is “data-rich and theory-poor” as well as previous research on the role of theory in social gerontology provided by Bengtson and colleagues, we introduce a new coding scheme capable of extracting and quantitatively analyzing relevant information regarding key study characteristics of gero-psychological research, including references to theory. Our goal was to provide a detailed description of gero-psychological research as well as to detect change, while also comparing articles published between 1990 and 1994 and between 2000 and 2004 (the same periods as in Bengtson et al.’s research). We relied on a randomly drawn sample of N = 535 empirical articles, representing 50% of the material published in the two flagship journals in the field of gero-psychology during the target time periods, i.e., Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences (JoG) and Psychology and Aging (P&A). We found reasonable interrater agreement for the new coding scheme. Regarding key study characteristics, we found, for example, that research related to memory and learning significantly decreased from 38% to 27.3%, whereas research related to social psychology and social-psychological processes as well as research on successful aging increased significantly. References to theory increased from 30% to 44%. We conclude that the intensity of theory use in gero-psychology and respective change from 1990–1994 to 2000–2004 has been consistently somewhat higher than in social gerontology (increase from 27% to 39%), though overall surprisingly low. We discuss this finding in the light of different theoretical entities used in gero-psychological research.