The challenges of age research

Traditionally, age research has flowed in the three streams of the biological, the medical and the social sciences. The three traditions differ most obviously in the questions they ask, but there are also conceptual and epistemological divergences. The significance of 'theory' differs between the social and biomedical sciences as does the emphasis on qualitative and quantitative methods. Often what is required in studies of human ageing is a combination of methods to illuminate different aspects of a problem. The study of physical causes and mechanisms of disease falls to biological and medical sciences. The search for preventive or therapeutic interventions that depend on changes in behaviour, at individual or societal level, depend heavily on input from the social sciences. Observational studies generate hypotheses and sometimes refute them, but the proof of any theoretical pudding has to lie with experiment in the form of rigorously conducted interventive trials.