Secondary Friendship Networks and Psychological Well-Being Among Elderly Women

One of-the major issues in social gerontology is, and has been, the relationship between social integration and psychological well-being during old age. There are two major theories which predict opposite outcomes. Activity theory suggests that the aging individual should compensate for role losses by increasing activities in other areas, such as friendship, in order to be happy (Havighurst & Albrecht, 1953). Disengagement theory, on the other hand, suggests that a mutual withdrawal of the individual and society contributes to successful aging (Cumming & Henry, 1961). The unresolved issues of this controversy and the critiques of the two theories are too lengthy to describe here. As Larson (1978) observed in a review of the research on the subjective well-being of older Americans, though researchers using different measures of psychological well-being and activity have often reported different findings, they have shown that these two variables are, in general, positively related.