Attitudes toward Age: An Exploration in School-Age Children

Abstract

Attitudes toward young, middle-age, and old persons were studied in 1000 children (grades 6, 8, 10, 12). Three newspaper photographs were presented to the children, who estimated the persons' ages and wrote stories about each photograph in his preferred order. Scores from a semantic differential which provided three factors, Evaluation, Affect, and Activity-Potency, were used in a three-way analyses of variance to analyze further children's attitudes. The overriding impression from these findings is that these school children do not share the allegedly general, negative attitude toward old age. The age estimates showed judgmental accuracy and were remarkably uniform in both central tendency and variation. The overall order of choice was young person, first; old person, second; and middle-age person, last.

The impact of participation in an oral history project on adolescents' attitudes toward old people

“…The scores obtained were similar to those found in two recent studies with large samples of adolescents (Ivester & King, 1977;Thomas & Yamamoto, 1975) . Although there was room for improvement in the scores (i.e., there was not a ceiling effect), the lack of great change in attitudes should not be considered as a "failure" for the program.…”

“…Age and contact with grandparents were unrelated to attitudes. Thomas and Yamamoto (1975) found adolescents were able to accurately identify the ages of three men in photographs. The stories they wrote about each photograph were superficial but revealed an understanding of the life cycle.…”

“…Several studies suggest that the young hold strong negative attitudes (Collette-Pratt, 1976;Harris, 1975;Kastenbaum & Durkee, 1964), although other studies have found ambivalent or positive attitudes Ivester & King, 1977;Thomas & Yamamoto, 1975) . There is conflicting evidence for sex differences and the effect of contact with the aged.…”

Intergenerational programming: attitudes of children and perceptions of older adult participants

“…Evaluative or affective attitude contents represent an individual's feelings and subjective evaluations of the attitude object while intentional or conative attitude contents represent the actions proposed by an individual based upon his or her beliefs and subjective evaluations towards the attitude object. These components of attitude, while not being accepted by all researchers, are the basis of attitude measures in much of the literature on attitudes of children toward the elderly (Aday et al, 1991;Seefeldt, 1987b;Dellman-Jenkins, Lambert, Fruit, & Dinero, 1986;Knox et al, 1986;Marks et al, 1985;Baggett, 1981;Jantz, Seefeldt, Galper, & Serock, 1977;Seefeldt et al, 1977a;Thomas & Yamamoto, 1975;Rosencranz & McNevin, 1969;Golde & Kogan, 1959).…”

“…Assessments of children's attitudes through evaluations of story writing have been used to measure children's attitudes toward older adults (Thomas & Yamamoto, 1975;Hickey, Hickey, & Kalish, 1968). Hickey et al, (1968), evaluated third-grade students' writing assignments about "old people".…”