Theorizing Elder Abuse

Although tremendous growth has occurred in the breadth and depth of topics investigated within the elder abuse literature, identification of the theoretical underpinnings of elder abuse research, practice, and policy has lagged behind the empirical output. Many academicians as well as practitioners fail to acknowledge explicitly the influence of theory on their research, teaching, programmatic, and policy efforts. Reasons for the lack of theory guidance and interpretation include limited national attention and concern about elder abuse, little federal funding to support theory development, and over reliance on caregiver stress models [72]. To address the dearth of theory use within the field of elder abuse, experts were invited to a meeting coordinated by the National Institutes of Justice [106] to discuss the appropriateness of requiring research proposals and peer-reviewed manuscripts focused on elder abuse to have an underlying conceptual framework or theory. Opinion was mixed, with the support or lack thereof tending to fall along participants’ disciplinary lines. As would be expected, investigators from academic disciplines that rely heavily on explicit theoretical foundations were highly supportive of the inclusion of theory, whereas investigators from research disciplines that more implicitly address theory regarded the requirement as an impediment to their work. We contend that it is critical to the advancement of the field of elder abuse that theory development moves forward. In this chapter, we draw upon multiple literatures to inform theory within the context of elder abuse. We begin by discussing the importance of theory and theorizing in general, and for enhancing a nascent field of study like elder abuse in particular. Our argument for the importance of theory is followed by a historical overview of theories most often applied to the study of elder abuse and a depiction of theory use in scholarly articles. The next section provides an examination of key theories from the child abuse and intimate partner violence literature, as well as broader theoretical perspectives that have the potential to inform work on elder abuse. We then propose and explain a new approach for theorizing about elder abuse, The Contextual Theory of Elder Abuse. The final section presents opportunities for continued theory development and theorizing in future research and practice. Although scholars differentiate among theories, perspectives, conceptual models, and schools of thought, investigators frequently use the terms interchangeably. As we examine different theoretical lenses relevant to the study of elder abuse, we will use ‘theory’ to acknowledge all types and levels.