The Achievement Syndrome: A Psychocultural Dimension of Social Stratification

Abstract

and physical aging processes can be analytically distinguished. Age identification rather than actual age constrains older people to recognize changes in themselves and to perceive that the attitudes of others toward them have changed. Analysis revealed that of the two major changes in social status that commonly occur in old age-retirement and widowhood-only retirement appears to hasten the onset of old age. Two hypotheses were advanced to explain this difference: one, retirement implies a social judgment that the person has become old, whereas widowhood, because it comes about through a natural event, does not have this implication for the older person; two, retirement has more serious consequences for age identification because it removes the individual from a significant peer group, whereas death of the spouse directly disrupts only a single, albeit a highly significant, relationship. The finding that participation in a friendship group serves to forestall a shift in age identification, but that the number of close friends and the frequency of contact with one's closest friend do not, provides support for the second hypothesis. However, the fact that participation in a friendship group appears to be less effective in retarding shifts in age identification among the retired than among the widowed indicates that the loss of the work group only partially explains the greater influence that retirement exerts an age identification. It, therefore, furnishes inferential evidence for the first hypothesis that the cultural evaluation implied by retirement, but not by widowhood, tends to force the person to recognize that he is socially defined as old.