Images of Older People in UK Magazine Advertising: Toward a Typology

Abstract

The use of images of older people in the British advertising media has been under-researched to date. Further, previous research in any country has tended to examine such images from an a priori framework of general impressions and stereotypes of older people. This study addresses these issues with British consumers' (n = 106) impressions, trait ascriptions, and similarity-between-images ratings of a representative sample of U.K. magazine advertisements featuring older characters. After a series of sorting task laboratory sessions, multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analyses revealed four clearly defined groups representing types of portrayals. These types emerged from the advertisements and from the views of the consumers themselves. These emergent groupings are: (1) Frail and Vulnerable, (2) Happy and Affluent, (3) Mentors, (4) Active and Leisure-oriented older adults. These groupings seem to be a logical context-appropriate derivation from previous findings on generally held stereotypes of older persons. It is argued that the groupings have the potential to contribute to a reliable typology of advertising portrayals of older people, with potential heuristic leverage in social scientific research of intergenerational communication, lifespan concerns, and the aging process.

Lonely older people as a problem in society – construction in Finnish media

“…differences in previous studies; see Lumme-Sandt 2010;Rozanova 2006;Vakimo 2001;Williams et al 2010). HS seemed to emphasise societal aspects more whereas ET emphasised emotional aspects.…”

“…Media studies have shown that these also appear in mass media (Ellis & Morrison 2005). Especially before the mid-1980s, foolish, senile, bitter or feeble minded characters represented old age in the media (Williams et al 2010). At the same time there was generally an underrepresentation of older people in the media (Bazzini et al 1997;Zhang et al 2006).…”

“…This solely negative portrayal and the under-representation of older people seem to be changing. Predominantly negative images have over the last decades been modified in different types of media by a tendency that Vincent (2003), among others, calls ''the liberation of old age'' and replaced by more positive images (Miller et al 1999(Miller et al , 2004Roy & Harwood 1997;Williams et al 2007Williams et al , 2010Zhang et al 2006). Older people are now more likely to be represented as actors and in roles which break the former stereotypes of older people.…”

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“…, Williams et al . ). Where older people are represented in print media, they are positioned predominantly as a health risk requiring management (Ylanne ), typically dependent and outside of society (Fealy et al .…”

The look of ageing: Agelessness as post-feminist cool? - The aging female CEO in contemporary US TV series

“…Most of these studies have concluded that older characters have been severely underrepresented in fi lm and television fi ction (compared to other age groups) but also in magazines and advertisements (cf. Williams, Wadleigh & Ylänne, 2010;Baumann & de Laat, 2012) and misrepresented in comparison to the distribution of older men and women in the US population. Signorielli and Bacue (1999) found that there had been no signifi cant change in representations of older people from the late 1960s through the 1990s; and, even though Barrett, Raphael and Gundersson (2014) conclude more recently that older people are not as invisible as they used to be, they also point out that they are still underrepresented.…”