Editorial

The papers in this special issue have been produced as part of the large-scale, multi-university, interdisciplinary research program known as SEDAP—the Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population. Funded in 1999 for 5 years by SSHRC, through the Multi-Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI), this program was the first large-scale research program on aging in Canada since CARNET, which was funded between 1991 and 1996 as part of the National Centres of Excellence (NCE) program.

Under the leadership of Dr. Byron Spencer, Department of Economics, McMaster University, SEDAP involved over 25 co-investigators, 15 research collaborators, and 65 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, representing 10 disciplines. The research program was structured around four theme areas: Population Aging and the Economy, Aging and Health, Aging and Family Life, and Retirement and Financial Security.

To date, over 115 articles have been mounted on the SEDAP Web site (http://socserve.socsci.mcmaster.ca/sedap).

SEDAP is the embodiment of a bold, long-term attempt to create a multidisciplinary research program that conceptually links economics with other social science disciplines in the study of aging processes and related policy issues. The SEDAP research program builds on an earlier project funded by SSHRC, the Independence and Economic Security in Old Age Program (IESOP), led by Denton and Spencer (see, e.g., Denton, Fretz, & Spencer, 2000), and on much earlier work by Denton and Spencer (with Marshall), funded in the first and subsequent rounds of the SSHRC Strategic Research Program on Population Aging. In short, SEDAP had its genesis about 25 years ago, when the study of population aging in Canada was in its infancy.

The 12 papers in this issue represent the four SEDAP theme areas and were selected from the 19 papers submitted for consideration in the fall of 2003. The submissions were peer-reviewed by 39 scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. On behalf of the authors, we sincerely thank these reviewers for their time, their response time, and their many important substantive suggestions that improved the manuscripts. The first six papers in the issue pertain, in general, to the Social Dimensions of Aging; while the last six address the Economic Dimensions of Aging.

Throughout this issue, you will encounter a range of advanced statistical techniques, as well as the creative use of qualitative data. The success of the SEDAP program has been enhanced by the greater availability of trained Canadian researchers in population aging and by the tremendous increase in the amount and quality of data, especially from nationally representative and, sometimes, longitudinal surveys. In this issue, several of the papers draw on such surveys as the Canadian Study of Health and Aging (CSHA), the General Social Survey (GSS), the National Population Health Survey (NPHS), and the Survey of Income Dynamics (SLID). The inclusion of little original data in the papers (i.e., data gathered de novo by SEDAP researchers) and the fact that qualitative data are not strongly represented in the papers, reflect a current international tendency to rely on the analysis of large, representative, and ideally, longitudinal data sets—such data did not exist in Canada a third of a century ago (when the guest editors of this issue began their Canadian research on aging phenomena). As well, this pattern reflects the fact that the economists associated with SEDAP represent mainstream economics and are well versed in the use of sophisticated statistical modelling.

In general, few of the papers in this issue are explicitly or even implicitly theoretical. Rather, most of them "do models", rather than "doing theory". Yet, there is a light seasoning of critical and political economy theory, and some of the authors invoke the life course perspective that characterizes much of contemporary research in aging. Only one paper (Prus) explicitly tests a theoretical principle from the life course perspective.

Taking the papers as a whole, three thoughts emerge:

1. 1. A reviewer of the edited collection of papers from the IESOP project, the precursor to SEDAP, concluded that the great divide between economists and other social and behavioural scientists continued. The papers in this issue, however, suggest that this gap...