Objectives Older adults experience higher risks of getting severely ill from COVID-19, resulting in widespread narratives of frailty and vulnerability. We test: (1) Whether global aging narratives have become more negative from before to during the pandemic (Oct’19 to May’20) across 20 countries; (2) Model pandemic (incidence and mortality), and cultural factors associated with the trajectory of aging narratives. Methods We leveraged a 10-billion-word online-media corpus, consisting of 28 million newspaper and magazine articles across 20 countries, to identify nine common synonyms of ‘older adults’ and compiled their most frequently-used descriptors (collocates) from Oct’19 to May’20—culminating in 11,504 collocates that were rated to create a Cumulative-Aging-Narrative-Score-(CANS) per month. Widely used cultural dimension scores were taken from Hofstede, and pandemic variables, from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. Results Aging narratives became more negative as the pandemic worsened across 20 countries. Globally, scores were trending neutral from Oct’19 to Feb’20, and plummeted in Mar’20, reflecting COVID-19’s severity. Pre-pandemic (Oct’19), UK evidenced the most negative aging narratives; peak-pandemic (May’20), South Africa took on the dubious honor. Across the 8-month period, Philippines experienced the steepest trend towards negativity in aging narratives. Ageism, during the pandemic, was ironically, not predicted by COVID-19’s incidence and mortality rates, but by cultural variables: Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long-term Orientation. Discussion The strategy to reverse this trajectory lay in the same phenomenon that promoted it: A sustained global campaign—though, it should be culturally nuanced and customized to a country’s context.
Background Seldom in history does one get a ‘front row seat’—with large-scale dynamic data—on how online news media narratives shift with a global pandemic. News media narratives matter because they shape societal perceptions and influence the core tent poles of our society, from the economy to elections. Given its importance—and with the benefit of hindsight—we provide a systematic framework to analyze news narratives of Covid-19, laying the groundwork to evaluate policy and risk communications. Objectives We leverage a 10-billion-word-database of online news, taken from over 7,000 English newspapers and magazines across 20 countries, culminating in 28 million articles. First, we track the volume of Covid-19 conversations across 20 countries from before to during the pandemic (Oct’19 to May’20). Second, we distill the phases of global pandemic narratives, and elucidate regional differences. Methods To track the volume of Covid-19 narratives, we identified 10 target terms—Coronavirus, Covid-19, Covid, nCoV, SARS-CoV-2, Wuhan Virus, Virus, Disease, Epidemic, Pandemic—and tracked their combined monthly prevalence across eight months from October 2019 through May 2020. Globally, across 20 countries, we identified 18,042,855 descriptors of the target terms. Further, these descriptors were analysed with natural language processing models to generate the top five topics of Covid-19 that were labelled by two independent researchers. This process was repeated across six continents to distil regional topics. Results Our model found four phases of online news media narratives: Pre-pandemic, Early, Peak and Recovery. Pre-pandemic narratives (Oct’19–Dec’19) were divergent across regions with Africa focused on monkeypox, Asia on dengue fever, and North America on Lyme disease and AIDS. Early (Jan–Feb’20) and Peak Pandemic (Mar–May’20) evidenced a global convergence, reflecting the omnipresence of Covid-19. The brief transition from early to peak pandemic narratives underscored the pandemic’s rapid spread. Emerging from the embers of the pandemic’s peak were nascent recovery words that are regionally divergent—Oceania focused on hope and an uncertain future while North America centered on re-opening the economy and tackling discrimination. Conclusions Practically, we presented a media barometer of Covid-19, and provided a framework to analyse the pandemic’s impact on societal perceptions—laying the important groundwork for policy makers to evaluate policy communications, and design risk communication strategies.
Background and Objectives While studies have researched ageism in public policy, few investigated the impact of aging policy on ageism—typically, an unintended consequence. Ageism is linked to $63 billion in healthcare cost, so its antecedents are of interest. We test the association between Aging-Policy-Agenda-Setting and Societal-Age-Stereotypes; and hypothesize a mediating pathway via Medicalization-of-Aging, moderated by demographics. Research Design and Methods Scholars identified Singapore’s Pioneer-Generation-Policy (PGP) as one of the largest policy implementations in recent years, where the agenda was set by the Prime Minister at an equivalent State-of-the-Union address in 2013, and US$7 billion allocated to fund outpatient healthcare costs for aged 65 years/older. Over 400,000 older adults received a PGP card and home visits by trained volunteers who co-devised a personalized utilization plan. We leveraged a 10-billion-word dataset with over 30 million newspaper and magazine articles to dynamically track Societal-Age-Stereotype scores over 8 years from pre-to-post policy implementation. Results Societal-Age-Stereotypes followed a quadratic trend: Prior to the Aging-Policy-Agenda-Setting from 2010-2014, stereotypes were trending positive; after 2014, it trended downwards to become more negative. Medicalization-of-Aging mediated the relationship between Aging-Policy-Agenda-Setting and Societal-Age-Stereotypes. Further, Old-age-Support-Ratio moderated the mediational model, suggesting that the impact of Policy on Medicalization is stronger when a society is more aged. Discussion and Implications We provided a framework for policy makers to ameliorate the unintended consequences of aging policies on societal ageism—if unaddressed, it will exert an insidious toll on older adults, even if initial policies are well-intentioned.
BackgroundPresently, most film analyses related to older adults are peculiar to American cinema. However, film industries outside the United States are influential in their own right. As ageism is a pan‐cultural phenomenon, it is important to explore filmic representations of older persons globally. This study is the first to offer a portrait of how filmic portrayals of older persons differ across regions.MethodsWe leveraged a 200‐million‐word movie corpus comprising over 25,000 scripts from 88 countries in 11 regions. The movies span a period of nearly 90 years, from 1930 to 2018. We identified synonyms of “older adult(s)” and compiled the top descriptors that co‐occurred most frequently with them. Seventeen thousand five hundred and eight descriptors were generated from 3384 movies. Using these descriptors, we calculated the valence of filmic portrayals of older adults on a scale of 1 (most negative) to 5 (most positive) in each region.ResultsPositive representations of older adults in movies were lacking in all 11 regions. Four regions fell into the neutral zone and the remaining seven in the negative zone. Representations of older persons were the least negative in East Asia and South Asia, and most negative in Southeast Asia as well as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Our topic modeling revealed that older adults were portrayed as venerable in both South and East Asia. Meanwhile, older people were associated with death in MENA. The idea that society is ill‐equipped to handle an aging population was hinted at in Southeast Asia.ConclusionsAs societies worldwide navigate a major demographic turning point, it is vital that filmmakers rethink portrayals of old age. In articulating the filmic narratives surrounding old age in different regions, our study lays the foundation to combat ageism on the big screen.
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