At a macro level, many populations grew older during the 20th century, and population aging has become a global phenomenon in the 21st century. The data available to study aging have expanded rapidly in recent decades with the growth of panel studies and comparable surveys in different countries. Another handle for seeing how context affects aging is comparative research across societies. One way to discover how social forces shape aging is to compare the aging experiences of different birth cohorts (a birth cohort consists of those born in a particular year who age together through time) and/or different components of the population (based on gender, social class, race/ethnicity, etc.). Among the important social structures that influence how we age are family systems, state programs and policies, organization of education and work, religion, and health care. This means that the ways in which individuals age are shaped by the existing social structures that they encounter over their life course.

To a much greater extent than is commonly recognized, aging is socially constructed.

This process of aging over the life course is affected by biological and psychological factors, but a sociological perspective makes an important contribution to our understanding of aging by explicating how social, economic, and political forces shape the aging experience. Thus, to understand how old age is experienced, one must look at the entire life course that preceded reaching old age. Although the sociology of aging focuses primarily on the later years of life, it is grounded in an understanding that aging of individuals is a lifelong process of growing up and growing older.

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