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The aim of this paper is to identify resources essential gerontology (aging studies) resources and liaison strategies that provide guidance for academic librarians working with faculty and students in this highly interdisciplinary field.

A convenience sample of gerontology faculty was surveyed to identify important materials, including preferred journals, databases, reference books, and sources of grey literature for gerontology research and teaching. Gerontology faculty information seeking behaviors, including faculty-librarian partnership, were also examined.

Results confirm that faculty teaching in gerontology use a wide variety of resources in their teaching and research. Faculty identified frequently used journals, reference materials, databases as well as sources of grey literature produced by non-profits, special interest group/lobbying organizations, educational organizations, and/or government agencies.

Surveying faculty from undergraduate gerontology programs would have likely increased the number of participants completing the online questionnaire, presumably increasing the reliability of the results.

Few studies identify the resources that faculty in gerontology graduate programs value and what services the library can provide or improve. This paper addresses these gaps and recognizes the need to support the growing number of interdisciplinary programs in gerontology.

The purpose of this paper is to bibliometrically analyze the gerontology-related research articles for a comprehensive understanding of the gerontology literature.

This study employed the approach of visual analytics on 32 journals with a total of 99,204 articles published after 2000 to identify the main subfields, keywords, and growth trend. The investigated journals are either open access online or listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. In addition, the 200 most frequently cited papers were analyzed through bibliographic coupling, co-word, and co-citation analysis.

The selected most cited papers were mostly published before 2007, and psychiatry and psychology were the top research subfields. Dementia, older adult, and Alzheimer’s disease were the three most frequently occurring keywords, both in Author Keywords and KeyWords Plus. While coupling analysis yielded 12 research groups, co-word analysis classified the most frequently used 20 Author Keywords into two categories. Four research clusters were identified by the co-citation analysis.

This research provides a comprehensive view of the gerontology research as well as an understanding of the subfields and their interrelations. It also provides government departments with directions for formulating and executing policies affecting older people not only in setting academic and professional priorities but also in understanding the key topics related to older people.

The purpose of this paper is to contextualise the need for a social theory of ageing. For a long time, social gerontology has been accused of being “data rich but theory poor”. The paper reviews this and maps out the importance of research themes of social theory and sets the scene for the articles that have used social theory in an innovative way to shed light on international experiences of ageing.

The paper is an introduction to the collection. It mainly is a literature review of key theoretical ideas and trends on social theory and ageing.

The paper points to how different dimensions of social theory are internationalised across USA, Israel, UK and Europe. The use of theory in an informed manner gives intellectual respectability to empirical research in social gerontology.

The paper is original in that it points to the gaps in social gerontology in terms of theoretical development. It sets the scene for the very original papers on social theory that is assessed by different levels: macro, messo and micro forms of theoretical analysis of ageing.

The purpose of this concluding paper is to reflect on the theories of ageing well delineated by the papers of the special issue. It sets research themes that social theorists of ageing should reflect upon in creating conceptual tools to understanding the power dynamics of older people and modern society.

The paper is an overview of the key issues that have been found by theories introduced throughout the special edition. It attempts to look ahead to seeing how social theory and ageing will need to be strengthened so that theory and experiences are inter‐locked.

This concluding paper cites how social theory can be analysed in variety of international and national contexts that gives an holistic and not eurocentric approach to social gerontology.

The paper is original in that it points to the future challenges social gerontology in terms of theorising ageing. The great value of social theory is that it provides critical questions about the nature of modern society and the implications this has for older people. This is original in getting researchers to see the creative use of theories of ageing.

The purpose of this article is to explore Maggie Kuhn's theoretical and analytical contributions to social gerontology and more broadly to the advancement of critical and public sociology.

This paper is an theoretical exploration of ageing. Maggie Kuhn's and the Gray Panthers theoretical contributions include analyses of, and related to: identity politics, intersectionality, cultural and media studies and the cognitive sciences, the forces and factors in the developing political economy of ageing including critiques of the ageing enterprise and the medical industrial complex, the sociology of knowledge of gerontology and globalization and world imperialism. The concluding section argues that the post‐retirement career of Maggie Kuhn was one of a Public Sociologist.

Maggie Kuhn fulfils the promise of the Project of Public Sociology, which “is to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these organic connections as part of our sociological life”. Maggie Kuhn's example moved forward the work of multiple generations of scholars. She lived and produced critical social analyses in pursuit of emancipatory knowledges. Her work is one of the earliest forms, if not the first, of critical pedagogy in gerontology; she promoted and advanced discourses of resistance. Maggie Kuhn was an engaged and outraged, practicing organic intellectual – the epitome of what bell hooks means by “teaching to transgress” and “education as the practice of freedom”. In the 24 years after her involuntary retirement, this was Maggie Kuhn's full‐time transformational agenda.

The paper looks at how the biography of Maggie Kuhn helped to engender the rise of radical social gerontology.

While most age groups in the United States show zero or near zero growth, older adults continue to increase in population. Futurists and demographers suggest that we are in a transitional period prior to an even more intense shift to an older society. They project that current increases in the education, income, activity, and advocacy of older adults will continue. Those rises, in turn, will enable elders to enhance public awareness of their development, role, and plight, leading to political and social action more favorable to them.

As the workforce is aging and becoming increasingly age diverse, successful aging at work has been proclaimed to be a desirable process and outcome, as well as a responsibility of both workers and their organizations. In this chapter, we first review, compare, and critique theoretical frameworks of successful aging developed in the gerontology and lifespan developmental literatures, including activity, disengagement, and continuity theories; Rowe and Kahn’s model; the resource approach; the model of selective optimization with compensation; the model of assimilative and accommodative coping; the motivational theory of lifespan development; socioemotional selectivity theory; and the strength and vulnerability integration model. Subsequently, we review and critically compare three conceptualizations of successful aging at work developed in the organizational literature. We conclude the chapter by outlining implications for future research on successful aging at work.

Many older adults engage in volunteer activities, drawing meaning and purpose through such efforts. Social distancing restrictions, put in place during Covid-19 surges to reduce the risk of transmission, disrupted older adult volunteers’ lives and volunteer experiences. Social distancing measures provide a unique opportunity to explore what happened when the choices around pausing or stopping volunteering were not entirely within the control of older adults. This paper aims to explore the experiences of older adult volunteers as they navigated uncertainties and made difficult decisions around balancing their safety and their desire to continue volunteering.

The authors conducted interviews with 26 community-dwelling older adults, age 50+, who had engaged in volunteer activities for at least 1 h a week prior to the start of the pandemic. The interviews were conducted on the phone or via Zoom. The authors used thematic analysis to help us analyze the data and identify patterns from participants’ experiences.

Despite the risk presented by Covid-19, most participants volunteered during the pandemic. They continued some or all of their previous activities with safety-related adjustments, with some seeking new or different opportunities. Participants’ discussions highlight the challenges of volunteering during the pandemic and the importance of engagement to their resiliency and subjective well-being.

This paper provides original contributions to understanding how and why older adults volunteered during the Covid-19 pandemic. The social distancing measures provide a novel opportunity to enrich our understanding of the meaningfulness and value of volunteerism to older adults’ lives and subjective well-being.

Integrated transitions of care for rural older persons are key issues in policy and practice. Interdisciplinary partnerships are suggested as ways to improve rural-care transitions by blending complementary skills of disciplines to increase care’s holistic nature. Yet, only multidisciplinary efforts are frequently used in practice and often lack synergy and collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to present a case of a partnership model using nursing, gerontology and public health integration to support rural-residing elders as a part of building an Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program.

This paper uses the Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland/O’Sullivan framework to examine the creation of an interdisciplinary team. Two examples of interdisciplinary work are discussed. They are the creation of an interdisciplinary public health course and its team-based on-campus live simulations with a panel and site visit.

With team-building successes and challenges, outcomes show the need for knowledge exchange among practitioners to enhance population-centered and person-centered care to improve health care services to older persons in rural areas.

There is a need to educate providers about the importance of developing interdisciplinary partnerships. Educational programming illustrates ways to move team building through the interdisciplinary continuum. Dependent upon the needs of the community, other similarly integrated partnership models can be developed.

Transitions of care work for older people tends to be multi- or cross-disciplinary. A model for interdisciplinary training of gerontological practitioners in rural and frontier settings broadens the scope of care and improves the health of the rural older persons served.

Although childless women comprise around 17% of women aged 65 and over in the US (Census Bureau, US, 2016) and up to 20% in other places in the world (Dykstra, 2009), the intersection of childlessness, female gender and old age has not been as widely explored as is necessary; older women have historically been and continue to be overlooked in feminist research compared to other groups of women (Browne, 1998; Ray, 1996; Twigg, 2004). Therefore, how childlessness affects identity and identity, childlessness in later life is not well understood. Our analysis considered: How do never-married, childless women identify themselves in terms of age? What are the key features of such an age identity? And, do these identities align with progress narratives or narratives of decline? For this chapter, interviews with 53 older women (22 African American, 31 White) aged 60 and over, who described themselves as never married and without biological children, were analysed. Questions were semi-structured and open-ended and covered background health information, a life story interview, questions about social networks, various forms of generativity and the sample’s views about the future. Overall, these women negotiated their age identity not necessarily in relation to others (e.g. child, spouse) but in relation to themselves as social actors with an orientation towards the future – what will tomorrow bring? These forward-thinking narratives point to a new and important way to consider progress narratives and to rethink trajectories of the experience of aging.