The study of productive aging offsets the tendency to conceptualize older adulthood as existing only through the lens of physical and cognitive decline. Social policies dealing with elderly persons frequently establish barriers that impede the older person from full participation in society. Many older persons desire to maintain active engagement with the community-at-large in their post-retirement years through the continued use of skills, talents, and abilities they have honed over a lifetime. Productive aging, defined as an applied concept, is "the capacity to work, whether paid or unpaid, to volunteer, and to assist others in the family; and to maintain, to varying degrees, autonomy and independence for as long as possible (Butler and Schechter, 2001, p. 824). This study examines the significance of a set of ten predictor variables and their relationship to the concept of productive aging in the elderly population.

Employing Wave III from the Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) longitudinal data set, two models, including various combinations of the independent variables age, gender, race, yearly income, amount of physical activity, the extent of social support, one's self perception, the ability to carry out activities of daily living, the level of depression, and the extent of cognitive impairment are examined as predictive elements of productive aging. Results of the study shed light on and provide insight into the complexities of productive aging, thereby giving social worker knowledge they need for advocacy and policy development as well as leverages points for establishing practice interventions.