Compare methods

	Life Review and Reminiscence Method	Attitudes to Aging Questionnaire
Field	Social Gerontology	Social Gerontology
Family	Process / pipeline	Latent structure
Year of origin	1963	2007
Originator	Robert N. Butler	Ken Laidlaw, Mick Power, Silke Schmidt & the WHOQOL-OLD Group
Type	Qualitative developmental and therapeutic method for older adults	Self-report scale of an older person's own attitudes to ageing
Seminal source	Butler, R. N. (1963). The life review: an interpretation of reminiscence in the aged. Psychiatry, 26(1), 65-76.	Laidlaw, K., Power, M. J., Schmidt, S., & WHOQOL-OLD Group (2007). The Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire (AAQ): development and psychometric properties. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 22(4), 367-379.
Aliases	Life Review Therapy, Integrative Reminiscence, Butler Life Review, Structured Reminiscence Method	AAQ, Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire, Laidlaw Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire, WHOQOL-OLD Attitudes Measure
Related	3	3
Summary	The life review and reminiscence method is a structured procedure for eliciting, organizing, and re-evaluating an older person's recollections of their past across the whole span of life. Robert Butler introduced the concept in 1963, arguing that the upsurge of reminiscence common in late life is not idle dwelling on the past or a sign of decline but a normal, developmental process triggered by the awareness of approaching death. In this view the aging person spontaneously reviews unresolved conflicts and unfinished business, and when this review is facilitated well it can lead to reintegration, reconciliation, and a sense of wisdom rather than to despair. The method has since become both a research technique in narrative gerontology and a widely used psychotherapeutic intervention for depression, grief, and identity in older adults. It connects directly to Erikson's final psychosocial stage, in which the task is to achieve ego integrity rather than fall into despair. By moving systematically through life stages and helping the person re-evaluate what they recall, the practitioner converts diffuse reminiscence into a coherent, meaning-making narrative.	The Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire (AAQ) measures how older adults perceive their own experience of growing older, capturing self-directed attitudes rather than younger people's stereotypes of the old. Developed by Ken Laidlaw, Mick Power, Silke Schmidt, and the WHOQOL-OLD Group and published in 2007, it was created within the World Health Organization's cross-cultural quality-of-life programme to fill the absence of a multidimensional, older-person-centred attitude measure. The questionnaire contains 24 self-report items, eight per subscale, spanning three domains: psychosocial loss, physical change, and psychological growth. Respondents rate agreement on a Likert scale, and items are summed within each domain so that higher scores indicate a more positive attitude to ageing. Crucially, the AAQ treats ageing as having both negative and genuinely positive aspects, so the growth subscale recognizes wisdom and development rather than framing ageing only as decline. It was validated across many countries and has become a standard tool for studying self-perceptions of ageing and their links to well-being.