By Eric Lindberg
Vern Bengtson had his sights set on a career in medicine when he got a little sidetracked.
Having just completed his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Chicago’s North Park College, he planned to pursue a joint MD/PhD program but his affection for a woman prompted him to search for options that would allow him to stay in the area.
“I wanted to be a well-rounded physician,” he said. “I wanted a career in what was then called social psychiatry, but they didn’t have any fellowships in Chicago.”
Instead, he wound up securing a public health fellowship at the University of Chicago in a burgeoning discipline known as gerontology. So new was the topic of study that Bengtson pronounced it with a hard g until Bernice Neugarten, a pioneer in the field, set him straight.
As his interest in aging populations blossomed, it was an assignment during a class on research methods that truly shifted his focus away from medicine. His task was to observe a three-generation family and analyze their family dynamics.
“I was just so fascinated by the similarities and differences between each generation,” he said. “I saw continuities there that I had no idea would exist and I saw differences that were very different than I expected.”
His growing interest in human development and intergenerational research prompted Bengtson to drop out of the medical branch and focus solely on gerontology, a decision that shaped the subsequent decades of his scholarly work and ultimately led him to the USC School of Social Work, where he serves as an adjunct professor with the Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging.
“The field just took off and became more and more fascinating to me,” he said. “Like a little boat in a rising tide, I rose with it and my career rose with it.”
After earning a doctorate in human development and social psychology in 1967, Bengtson joined the USC faculty and helped launch the university’s Andrus Gerontology Center, one of the first institutes dedicated to aging research in the country. He was also instrumental in the development of the Davis School of Gerontology.
The success of his career is reflected in both his funding record, having received research and training grants totaling $24 million, and his publication record, which includes 16 books and more than 240 research papers.
As a young scholar at USC, he expanded upon his initial foray into intergenerational research by launching a study with 350 families from a large health care system in Southern California. The project evolved into the groundbreaking 35-year Longitudinal Study of Generations, an in-depth exploration of mental health, psychological well-being, values, politics, and family dynamics across three generations.
“At that time, the generation gap was scaring the hell out of the American public,” Bengtson said. “It looked like young people were rebelling against the parents and all the structures of adult society.”
He initially believed that to be the case—that young adults involved in the peace and anti-Vietnam War movements were rebelling against their parents. What his research uncovered was quite to the contrary.
At least half of the protesters had parents who were active during the union movements of the 1930s, people who safely could be described as having socialist leanings.
“Rather than rebelling against their parents, these students were carrying out a family tradition,” he said.
Another major finding was a significant amount of heterogeneity within the youth population, whose members are often lumped together as a monolith. In fact, there were as many differences among young participants in the study as there were between the youth and their middle-aged parents, Bengtson said.
Although he is often bemused when commentators homogenize the values of certain age groups, Bengtson said that mind-set can have serious implications for public policy and society as a whole. “We shouldn’t stereotype people just because of the age group they belong to,” he said. “We should instead recognize diversity within age groups and especially the diversity within families. I think that message is very important to get across.”
It is a particularly critical issue for aging populations, he said, arguing that most social policy related to older adults in the United States doesn’t take into account their diversity. For example, Bengtson said, churches of many denominations often dedicate their resources to programs for youth and young parents; when programs do exist for older groups, they might consist of bus service to get them to church.
“In most social institutions, the elderly are treated as dependent, frail, increasingly deteriorating individuals, whereas there is so much talent, vivacity, and resilience in that population,” he said.
In his latest book, which addresses the transmission of religion across generations, Bengtson notes that many older adults experience a spiritual or religious renewal during retirement, perhaps due to an awareness of their mortality or simply the fact that they have more time to become involved in spiritual pursuits.
“They don’t need a bus trip to church,” he said. “They need programs that meet their spiritual and religious needs, their intellectual needs, and we just don’t have that.”
Bengtson himself had entered semi-retirement in recent years, leaving the USC Davis School of Gerontology in 2006 but continuing to work on his book manuscript.
However, he couldn’t stay away from academia and jumped at an invitation from Marilyn Flynn, dean of the USC School of Social Work, to join the Roybal Institute of Aging and to teach a doctoral course on social work theory.
He hopes to further develop the school’s theory curriculum, particularly in the doctoral program. Currently, some courses focus on macro issues, such as social work in organizations, whereas others address micro-level topics such as social work practice with clients.
Bengtson plans to create closer connections between the various courses, showing students how issues at the client level have parallels at the larger organizational and policy level.
“Social workers have not been able to mobilize themselves as well at the level of social policy,” he said. “Even worse, almost all public policy is blissfully atheoretical. The bases on which decisions are made to spend billions of dollars are purely political and not theoretical or based on evidence.”
At the Roybal Institute, he is focusing on research projects that address health disparities among older populations as well as the negative effects of issues such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and age on health and well-being.
“Even more exciting are the exceptions—those people who, despite these cumulative disadvantages, have somehow managed to buffer them and survive and thrive,” Bengtson said. “We focus so much on the negative disadvantages and problems. From my perspective, you can’t fix it if you don’t know how it works in the first place.”