Thinking about Aging: Experience, Identity and Meaning among an Elderly Population in the Philippines

Abstract

The paper aims to know the idioms that the elderly use to describe and make sense of their experience of aging. It is based on ethnographic data gathered through the in-depth interview of 30 normal and community dwelling elderly in Marikina City, Metro Manila, Philippines in 2012-2013. The participants were chosen through compulsive sampling from the registry of 1385 senior citizens screened free from dementia. Their age ranged from 60 to 90 years, regardless of social class, gender, ethnicity, religion and other indices of difference. The interviews were transcribed, verbatim, and coded for the idioms, their meanings and contexts in which the elderly used them. The elderly communicate in idioms, which maybe basic to denote identity that obtains from aging or secondary in that they develop from the basic ones and help define identity further. The idioms relate to either continuity or discontinuity theory of aging or help rationalize what it means to be human and elderly.