Challenges to Minority Aging Research in the Next Century

In my many years of research in the field of minority aging, perhaps my most difficult challenge was giving advice to practitioners regarding their work with their patients, clients, or their families. Scientific generalizations, by definition are attempts to summarize and simplify reality and may thus give stereotypical information to the practitioner working with older people from a certain group. Yet, as Murphy and Longino (1997) in their editorial in this journal argued, the gap between theory and research on the one hand and