Abstract

This ‘Festschrift’ brings together a collection of fifteen chapters that directly or indirectly intersect with Vern Bengtson’s foundational contributions to our understanding of families and aging. Bengtson is most widely known for his role in starting the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a multi-disciplinary investigation of multi-generation families that began in 1971, and for his theoretical contributions including his collaborations with others in developing and refining the family solidarity paradigm and the family solidarity-conflict model. However, these are just a few of his notable contributions in a career that has garnered major awards from the Gerontological Society of America, the American Sociological Association, and the National Council of Family Relations and one would be wrong to assume that a book honoring his contributions would simply be a collection of chapters using the solidarity-conflict model or the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG).