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Article: Older Men and Sleep: The Body, Function, and Narratives of Decline
- Article from:
- Generations
- Article date:
- April 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright American Society on Aging Spring 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Sleep, which is essential for our health and well-being, has been called "a state which has little in common with our waking life" (Harrison, 1994, p. 4). Most researchers who examine sleep in relation to older men assess sleep quality and sleep disorders (e.g., Driscoll et al., 2008), the effects of aging on the biology of sleep (e.g., Huang et al., 2002; Viriello, Larsen, and Moe, 2004), and whether the sleep patterns of aging men can be explained by hormonal shifts (e.g., Lunenfeld, 2002). Just as the body is a social and natural phenomenon, so is sleep. The basic sociological assumption is that when, where, and how we sleep are all sociocultural matters.
Recently, sociology has begun to ...