GUEST EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect presents a series of exploratory studies on judgments concerning elder abuse in a sample of European Americans as well as in samples from England, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Russia. Convenience samples in each of these countries provided examples of extreme, moderate, and mild abuse from an adult to an aging parent. These qualitative responses were coded with a coding manual developed by representatives from 24 different countries. This introduction to the special issue begins with a brief overview of issues in the definition of elder mistreatment, then describes the development and conduct of the research program that generated the current studies, explains the coding and data analytic procedures used to analyze the qualitative responses regarding elder abuse, and then identifies some of the main similarities and differences that emerged in the responses of participants from the seven different countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Elder abuse
• Perspectives
• European
• European American
• abuse
• neglect
• mistreatment