A group of Melbourne based occupational therapy educators and clinicians question the need for a paradigm for occupational therapy. They claim that professional status is more dependent upon expert organization (formal and informal) of the profession and its external relations than on conceptual and theoretical consensus. Identification of the state‐of‐the‐art of occupational therapy is held to be an important first step in the move towards better organization and relations with other health professions. Occupational therapists Australia‐wide are asked to assist in the identification process.

Australian social gerontology entered a new stage of development in the 1980s with the establishment of a number of research projects and educational programmes. The aim of this paper is to make a systematic review of the recent research literature and identify research achievements and knowledge gaps. A total of 158 research articles published in overseas and Australian academic journals are reviewed in terms of source of publication, author institutional affiliation, content and theoretical orientation, and research approaches. The findings show a steady increase In the volume of published material but a number of theoretical and methodological issues need further analysis. Notable gaps are in the psychological aspects of ageing, research by allied health professionals, studying ageing from a political economy perspective, and multi‐disciplinary and multi‐method approaches.

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