和訳困っています＞＜
This rather gloomy process is known as disengagement, based on the idea that there is an innate, biological tendency to disengage from society with age, rather like an animal creeping off to die by itself. It reflects a tendency of psychologists at that time to look for biological explanations for all human behavior. But there are many problems with this model. For one thing, the relative lack of social involvement of older people isn't anything like an animal creeping away to die, because the period of being 'an old person' or a pensioner is so very long. Nowadays, it isn't uncommon for people to live for 30 years or more after they have retired, and that's quite different from a couple of days of being ill and weak before dying-the normal state of affairs among wild animals.
Activity theory
That type of explanation also ignores the social factors involved in retirement. An alternative explanation for why older people don't seem to take as active a part in society as they might was put forward by Havinghurst, in 1964. Having hurst attributed it to the fact that older people have relatively few opportunities to play meaningful social roles in society. When someone is active and working, they play a large number of different social roles. These include various roles at work as well as roles to do with the family. In other words, as Hvinghurst put it, their role-count is high. But when someone retires from work, their role-count drops dramatically, because all the social roles that they played that were relevant to work -even ones as simple as being a commuter- vanish. All that is left are social roles to do with family and home.
In other words, Havinghurst was arguing, people becomes less visible when they retire simply because they don't have as many opportunities to play a part in everyday social living. And this has personal consequences, as well as social ones, because people can easily come to feel apathetic and useless as a result. The way to counteract this, Havinghurst argued, is for people to replace their lost social roles deliberately, by adding new ones such as joining clubs and societies for older people, or working for organizations like Oxfam, which employ people over conventional retirement age. keeping up one's role-count, according to Havinghurst, is the way to ensure a positive experience of old age.
