Kinship and Cohort in an Aging Society: From Generation to Generation

9. How Theory-Building Prompts Explanations about Generational Connections in the Domains of Religion, Spirituality, and Aging

chapter nine How Theory-Building Prompts Explanations about Generational Connections in the Domains of Religion, Spirituality, and Aging W. Andrew Achenbaum Few gerontologists have pursued theory-building with as much enthusiasm and insight as Vern Bengtson. Several generations of colleagues and students share his appreciation of the importance of taking theory-building seriously in advancing science. Researchers in aging understand the value of theories in identifying interesting questions and in setting boundaries. They recognize that a rigorous commitment to using the right lens to “see” the intellectual and methodological challenges at hand in a given project can enhance their investigations. Theory-building has animated Bengtson’s way of problem-solving as he has pursued multidisciplinary research in aging. The payoffs professionally for USC’s AARP/University Professor of Gerontology Emeritus have been considerable . Vern Bengtson has won virtually every major prize in his field and served in most of the important elected offices in the American Sociological Association and the Gerontological Society of America, among other august professional groups. Before I turn to the main thrust of this paper, I want to describe the ways that theory-building (broadly understood) has fired Vern Bengtson’s gerontological imagination as it set boundaries for what he wanted to explore and ex- 194 Religion and Families plain empirically. I should admit at the outset that I will be illustrating my argument by focusing on what, frankly, has been a rather minor subject in Vern Bengtson’s work. He did not write much about religion and spirituality in aging until late in his career, when he had refined his multidisciplinary approach to gerontological research. I choose “religion and spirituality” because it is a domain where our interests intersect. It is a domain where theory-building is critical in order to conjoin hermeneutics with science. How does defining and solving problems in a multidisciplinary manner affect how gerontologists conceptualize and present their findings? Why might this approach afford advantages to researchers on aging who otherwise rely exclusively on discipline-based theories? Commentaries on Theory-Building in the Writings of Vern Bengtson Bengtson, Cara Rice, and Malcolm Johnson wrote (1999, p. 5) that theory is “the construction of explicit explanations in accounting for empirical findings .” Because “theory” is a murky word, the trio distinguished theory from other facets of knowledge building. “Facts” and “empirical generalizations” clearly are part of the research enterprise, but the investigatory process entails more than the generation of measurable data interpreted statistically. “Models ” resemble theories, but they do not provide explanations, the key word in the trio’s definition of theory, “the why behind the what that is observed” (p. 6). Nor do all theories precipitate “paradigm shifts.” Still, as Thomas Kuhn declaimed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the accumulation of anomalous theories for explaining natural phenomena sometimes forces the scientific community to question the accuracy of prevailing ways of seeing , causing them collectively to embrace (a) different (set of) theories and methods. Theories, in Bengtson’s view, serve several purposes. They help investigators to describe, integrate, and explain data. Good theories serve as filters, identifying those “facts” that are germane to the problem at hand and those (however intriguing) that should be excluded. Theories have predictive value. Finally, theories in basic sciences often have real-world applications (Bengtson , 1989; Bengtson & Schaie, 1999, p. 7; Hendricks & Achenbaum, 1999, p. 33). Bengtson concedes that the quest for “grand theory” in aging has disenchanted gerontologists as well as researchers in other domains. As a graduate Religion, Spirituality, and Aging 195 student he was privy to the internal politics at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development and professional reaction to the rise and fall of “disengagement theory” (Achenbaum & Bengtson, 1994). And Bengtson realizes that the demands and time pressures placed upon policy analysts and social practitioners to generate practical remedies to assist older people can be so great as to make theory-building seem to be a luxury. Nonetheless, he has consistently maintained that “applications in gerontology—whether in medicine, practice, or policy—demand good theory, since it is on the basis of explanations about problems that interventions should be made; if not, they seem doomed to failure. Without theory, the contributions of individual studies in aging are likely to have little impact” (Bengtson, Rice, & Johnson, 1999, p. 16). Vern Bengtson throughout his career has championed the critical importance of theory-building in...