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Global Aging: Challenges for Community Psychology

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American Journal of Community Psychology

An Erratum to this article was published on 01 September 2010

Abstract

Older persons are among the major marginalized, disenfranchised citizens worldwide, yet this group has generally been ignored in the community psychology literature. In this paper, we trace the demographic trends in aging worldwide, and draw the field’s attention to the United Nations Program on Aging, which structures its policy recommendations in terms of concepts that are familiar to community psychologists. A central theme of the paper is that community psychology can have a role in producing the conceptual shifts needed to change societal attitudes now dominated by negative age stereotypes.

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Notes

  1. Readers are encouraged to refer to a recent volume, Regional dimensions of the ageing situation, published by the United Nations (available online at http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/ageing/research_papers.html) for further details about the demographic, socioeconomic, and policy issues due to population aging in different parts of the world.

  2. In many developing countries, old-age pensions, if any, are limited to former workers in the public sector or international corporations, and many countries are only starting to have universal pension programs which will take decades to mature (see UN 2007). China is starting to rebuild its pension system which disintegrated when it turned to market economy and many former state-owned enterprises went bankrupt. By the end of 2002, the social security umbrella covered only 14% of the workforce, most of whom were urban workers, though some 60% of the population is in rural areas (Cheng et al. 2008). This paper will not cover the issue of social security in detail, though a very important topic for aging societies as well as for community psychology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Sheung-Tak Cheng

  2. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47401, USA

    Kenneth Heller

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  1. Sheung-Tak Cheng
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  2. Kenneth Heller
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Correspondence to Sheung-Tak Cheng or Kenneth Heller.

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A correction to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10464-009-9257-5

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Cheng, ST., Heller, K. Global Aging: Challenges for Community Psychology. Am J Community Psychol 44, 161–173 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-009-9244-x

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