Research in social gerontology has concerned itself largely with monocultural populations. While the reasons for this vary, among them would have to be the once popular melting pot ideology which assumed that ethnic differences would disappear under the force of acculturation and the fact that ethnic minorities make up a relatively small proportion of all aged persons in this country. A recent text in the field notes that until the 1970s little was written about the ethnic aged and that "ethnogerontology is the newest and perhaps most underdeveloped field of social gerontology" (Hooyman and Kiyak 1988:477). The authors further note that most of this literature concerns the special disabilities that accompany aging for minority persons, an extension in one form or another of the well-known multiple jeopardy hypothesis. Thus, ethnicity has come into aging research primarily as a concern with a social problem. Consistent with this social problem orientation has been the pursuit of a research agenda in ethnic communities almost limited to measures of coping, adjustment, adaptation, and levels of life satisfaction.
But are coping and adaptation the only salient features of aging for minority persons or, for that matter, any other group of individuals? That question has been raised forcefully by Holzberg (1982) who asks about the relationship of culture to aging and whether measures of adjustment and satisfaction can