American Optometric Association
organization
The American Optometric Association (AOA) is an American medial professional group. Founded in 1898, it represents approximately 37,000 doctors of optometry, optometry students and para-optometric assistants and technicians in the United States.
Overview
The AOA states that:
The American Optometric Association represents more than 49,000 doctors of optometry, optometry students and paraoptometric assistants and technicians. Optometrists serve patients in nearly 6,500 communities across the country, and in 3,500 of those communities are the only eye doctors. Doctors of optometry provide two-thirds of all primary eye care in the United States.
Founded in 1898, the AOA is a federation of state, student and armed forces optometric associations. Through these affiliations, the AOA serves members consisting of optometrists, students of optometry, paraoptometric assistants and technicians.
The AOA has offices in St. Louis, Missouri (the headquarters) and Alexandria, Virginia, employing approximately 100 people. The association has four special interest sections: contact lenses and corneas, vision rehabilitation, sports vision and paraoptometrics.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “American Optometric Association” as organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4744609. VIAF identifies the subject as 140175227. The Library of Congress control number is n80079857. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1898.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “American Optometric Association” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.