Guest Editorial: On "Successful Aging and Well-Being: Self-Rated Compared With Rowe and Kahn"

Decision Editor: Laurence G. Branch, PhD I welcome the invitation to offer an editorial comment on the article "Successful Aging and Well-Being: Self-Rated Compared With Rowe and Kahn" (Strawbridge, Wallhagen, and Cohen 2002). I do so for two rather different reasons—appreciation for the data and analysis, but disagreement with parts of the interpretation and conclusion. ... I disagree with Strawbridge and colleagues 2002 on the following points. ... All this, of course, is opposite to Rowe's and my (Rowe and Kahn 1998) intentions in proposing the concept of successful aging and the several continua that defined it. We hoped to invite researchers to investigate the heterogeneity among older people and to discover its causes—genetic, psychosocial, and environmental. We hoped that research on successful aging and its biopsychosocial determinants would encourage people to make lifestyle choices that would maximize their own likelihood of aging well, that is, maintaining a high quality of life in old age. And with respect to policy makers, we hoped for the kinds of changes—access, quality of care, and opportunity structure—that would facilitate such individual efforts. The surge of interest in successful aging, by researchers and the larger public, suggests that these hopes may have been more realistic than the pessimistic predictions of some critics.