Societal Age Stereotypes in the U.S. and U.K. from a Media Database of 1.1 Billion Words.

Recently, 194 World Health Organization member states called on the international organization to develop a global campaign to combat ageism, citing its alarming ubiquity, insidious threat to health, and prevalence in the media. Existing media studies of age stereotypes have mostly been single-sourced. This study harnesses a 1.1-billion-word media database comprising the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English-with genres including spoken/television, fiction, magazines, newspapers-to provide a comprehensive view of ageism in the United Kingdom and United States. The US and UK were chosen as they are home to the largest media conglomerates with tremendous power to shape public opinion. The most commonly used synonym of older adults was identified, and its most frequently used descriptors were analyzed for valence. Such computational linguistics techniques represent a new advance in studying aging narratives. The key finding is consistent, though no less alarming: Negative descriptions of older adults outnumber positive ones by six times. Negative descriptions tend to be physical, while positive ones tend to be behavioral. Magazines contain the highest levels of ageism, followed by the spoken genre, newspapers, and fiction. Findings underscore the need to increase public awareness of ageism and lay the groundwork to design targeted societal campaigns to tackle ageism-one of our generation's most pernicious threats.

Aging Narratives Over 210 Years (1810-2019).

OBJECTIVES: The World Health Organization launched a recent global campaign to combat ageism, citing its ubiquity and insidious threat to health. The historical context that promoted this pernicious threat is understudied, and such studies lay the critical foundation for designing societal-level campaigns to combat it. We analyzed the trend and content of aging narratives over 210 years across multiple genres-newspaper, magazines, fiction, nonfiction books-and modeled the predictors of the observed trend. METHOD: A 600-million-word dataset was created from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English to form the largest structured historical corpus with over 150,000 texts from multiple genres. Computational linguistics and statistical techniques were applied to study the trend, content, and predictors of aging narratives. RESULTS: Aging narratives have become more negative, in a linear fashion (p = .003), over 210 years. There are distinct shifts: From uplifting narratives of heroism and kinship in the 1800s to darker tones of illness, death, and burden in the 1900s across newspapers, magazines, and nonfiction books. Fiction defied this trend by portraying older adults positively through romantic courtship and war heroism. Significant predictors of ageism over 210 years are the medicalization of aging, loss of status, warmth, competence, and social ostracism. DISCUSSION: Though it is unrealistic to reverse the course of ageism, its declining trajectory can be ameliorated. Our unprecedented study lay the groundwork for a societal-level campaign to tackle ageism. The need to act is more pressing given the Covid-19 pandemic where older adults are constantly portrayed as vulnerable.