Course Description: The subject of this course is the social and cultural aspects of aging. The emphasis in the course is on how the social sciences (sociology and anthropology in particular) conceptualize and treat old age rather than the specific findings of sociologists and anthropologists on the aged.

Course Objectives: This course is designed to introduce you to the sociological and anthropological treatments of aging. The course is also designed to further your familiarity with doing sociology and anthropology, or at least some aspects of that, in particular doing library research and developing some of the skills, both intellectual and practical, necessary to do that.

Format: A combination of lecture and seminar course, your input will be required and will partly determine your grade in the course. Think of the your in class participation as a weekly exam in place of a mid-term and final. Specific readings will be assigned each week and will be the subject of that class. You will also be given a question over WebCT (see below) to answer and email to me before class. As you read the assigned material think of how they are sociological. All readings should be done critically, while you are expected to understand the readings, you are free to agree or disagree with them; formulating clear and comprehensible criticisms are central to sociology (along with the other social sciences). Don't get behind, as, while there are no wrong views or opinions on the readings, there are uninformed ones.

WebCT: While it is not necessary that you use WebCT in this course, using it will make the course go along more easily. You will find that all of the topics and readings for the classes can be found in the Calendar, weekly questions will be asked in the discussion section of the course, email is easily sent to me though the WebCT mail (and doesn't go through my SPAM filter so won't get lost that way if you forget to put SA 3318 in the subject line), you can use the chat rooms, or the discussion areas. To get on to WebCT go here and enter your 9-digit student number and 6-digit PIN (from Student Web, or the first six digits of that PIN if is more than six digits) to log in. There is lots of help available throughout WebCT (from the sign-in page there are guides, help, and FAQs and when you are in WebCT there is always context sensitive help in the upper right corner of the screen). And always feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

For a good guide to writing university papers consult Michael Harvey's The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. This site has both a good general guide to writing essays (writing styles, organization, argument styles, etc.) as well as specific guides to writing and documentation styles, including a guide to APA, the style you will be using for your paper.

Here is a Word document template for APA as I discussed in class (it should download, not load, if it doesn't, right click on it - Windows, Mac with two button mouse - or control click - Mac - to download it). Open it and then save it as a document template. The template also seems to work in Wordperfect; again, open it, then immediately save it with another name (like 'SA3318_paper.wpd')

Here is and example of an annotated bibliography, and here is an example of a critical review of the literature, i.e., of your term paper.

Current news and updates

May 5, 2006: The course outline has been updated for Spring 2006.

Every hit means that your that much older,




heh, time flies when you're having fun.

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