| Popis: |
This chapter focuses on recent experience with social and epidemiological surveys and experiments with older populations conducted by New England Research Institute (NERI) staff in the north-eastern United States. Surveying the socio-medical behaviour of older people requires special approaches and some appreciation of the psychological, psychosocial and pathological impacts of aging. Researchers must be aware of the ways in which older people are, in various respects, like all other, some other, and no other demographic category. The proportion of people with multiple and often unrecognised conditions rises with age. Older people are not a homogeneous, undifferentiated group. Age divisions among older people are, in important respects, more significant than differences between older people as a whole and younger age groups. The signs and symptoms of the same disease may vary in different age groups. Some physiological changes associated with normal aging are, of course, separable from the effects of disease. |
