Aging in aging societies: the transfortion of life courses and how we study them

Rco Albertini and Daniele Vignoli

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2025, vol. 80, issue Supplement_2, S233-S243

Abstract: ObjectivesPopulation aging is reshaping life courses. This article examines how extended longevity and the collective experience of aging societies alter the timing, meaning, and structure of life course transitions. It explores how individuals adapt their behaviors, expectations, and intergenerational roles to these shifts, and how aging at the micro-level is embedded within cro-level demographic and institutional transfortions.MethodsDrawing on conceptual and empirical insights from the Age-It Research Program, alongside state-of-the-art gerontological and sociodemographic literature, the article adopts a life course perspective informed by the principles of timing and linked lives.ResultsPopulation aging transforms the life course in at least three fundamental ways. First, increasing longevity and improved health have opened a new stage of life after retirement. Second, delayed transitions in education, work, and family fortion are emerging as adaptations to longer lives, though they generate tensions with unchanged biological limits to fertility and evolving intergenerational expectations. Third, family structures are becoming increasingly “beanpole†—longer but thinner—reshaping intergenerational solidarities and increasing the relevance of extended- and non-kin ties.DiscussionThe increase in longevity is not merely stretching life but fundamentally redefining it. Growing old in an aging society becomes both a new individual experience and a collective transfortion that challenges the adequacy of traditional life course categories. The Age-It findings call for conceptual renewal to better capture new stages, shifting chronologies, and reconfigured solidarities. Population aging also reshapes the research agenda of gerontologists.

Keywords: Demographic change; Life course transitions; Intergenerational relations; Family structures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbaf215 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:80:y:2025:i:supplement_2:p:s233-s243.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().