Hi, Joy, welcome to PsychCentral!

That sounds like a fun assignment. I would look at Erickson's steps 7 and 8: http://www.learningplaceonline.com/s...ze/Erikson.htm

and then create a questionnaire and mail it to or interview as many older adults as you can round up Maybe visit an assisted living center or one of these new 55+ communities that are popping up all over. Ask them what age group they are in (give them a "range" and a checkbox to be in, 45-55, 55-65, 65+) and their primary concerns and interests at this time. See what they did as their job, if they worked, whether it was what they wanted to do when they were earlier and whether they had meaningful relationships, etc. In other words, ask questions that will show whether their lives followed Erickson's stages. I would "explore" the 55-65 age group and/or see if you can "separate" the people into the three age groups by their primary concerns and interests.

That might be an interesting "experiment". Do the questionnaire in two parts/pages where you can separate the name/age/"practical" information from the questions about their lives so you "sort" the answers to the questions without any idea how old the people are. See how you do separating the people by age group according to where they are in Erickson's scheme. The 45-55 should still be working/family, production/care oriented, the 55-65 a mix, "getting ready" for what comes next and going toward self-absorbed or stagnated and the 65+ should be working on making sense of it all (wisdom) and either more "themselves" or regretting.

But then you can discuss how well you did and why you did it the way you did and what that says about how accurate Erickson's scheme is and how good your questions were, etc.