Societal Age Stereotypes in the U.S. and U.K. from a Media Database of 1.1 Billion Words.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
; 18(16)2021 08 21.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1376827
ABSTRACT
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.
Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Stereotyping
/
Ageism
Type of study:
Observational study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Country/Region as subject:
North America
Language:
English
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Ijerph18168822
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