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The Worcester Area Project on Aging differsfrom other undergraduate research centers in its emphasis on basic research and its exclusive focus on an annual survey of the local elderly population; it differs fundamentally from graduate-level area studies programs in its involvement of undergraduates in research. These differences presented unique challenges during the two-year pilot period of the Project. After describing our experiences we identify several lessons about combining teaching and research at an undergraduate college. The lessons draw attention to problems of student recruitment, time constraints and the breadth of student involvement, and students' preparation in methods and statistics, as well as the educational value offaculty-student collaboration.

This paper uses a criticism of “objectivistic” approaches to aging and identity as a vehicle for a phenomenological rethinking of those topics. This phenomenological approach to “identity-in-the-world” as it is experienced in everyday life leads necessarily to a theory of the temporal limits of that experience in the aging process; that is, a theory of identity, properly understood, is already a theory of aging. It is concluded that this approach overcomes the parallel problems of objectivism versus subjectivism and biologism versus sociologism, demanding a rethinking of conceptions of human nature that have predominated in social science.