CONNECTION AND AUTONOMY IN THE LIVES OF ELDERLY MALE CELIBATES - DEGREES OF DISENGAGEMENT

Theories of aging emphasize connection and autonomy to varying degrees . Disengagement Theory (Cummings and Henry 1961) emphasizes an elder's natural movement toward greater isolation. The Psychosocial Withdrawa l Models postulate that society marginalizes its elders, reducing the scope of relationships and activities. Gero-transcendence (Tornstam 19 94) views the elderly as selectively investing in some relationships o ver others, rather than as a comprehensive withdrawal. The three persp ectives on aging predict patterns of connection and autonomy in the tr ansition to old age. Analysis of life narratives offers one method to test the empirical grounding of each set of predictions. Do elders vie w themselves as withdrawing from relations, as marginalized, or as gro wing selective in activities and relationships? The current study exam ines the narratives of elderly, celibate men living in a religious com munity. The religious order to which the subjects belong espouses a ph ilosophy of self-reflection, providing a population particularly well suited to the gathering of life histories. While a highly selective su bpopulation, a group of men having lived in community from four to sev en decades will have encountered the challenges of connection and auto nomy. The way in which they have struggled with these dialectics may f urther aid the understanding of dyadic and group patterns found in the elderly. The study seeks to understand how the subjects experience th e balance between connection-autonomy over the life span. Of the three predicted patterns of connection and autonomy, which receives empiric al support from the subjects' life narratives? The study makes use of a quantitative methodology to address dialectics found in life histori es.