Role-Based Framing of Older Adults Linked to Decreased Ageism Over 210 Years: Evidence From a 600-Million-Word Historical Corpus

Abstract

Background and Objectives Older adults are exhibiting greater diversity in their aging trajectories. This has led to movements by the World Health Organization and AARP to reframe aging. We compare role-based framing and age-based framing of older adults over 210 years—a time span beyond the reach of traditional methods—and elucidate their respective sentiments and narratives. Research Design and Methods We combined the Corpus of Historical American English with the Corpus of Contemporary American English to create a 600-million-word-dataset—the largest historical corpus of American English with over 150,000 texts collected from newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction. We compiled the top descriptors of age-based terms (e.g., senior citizen) and role-based terms (e.g., grandparent) and rated them for stereotypic valence (negative to positive) over 21 decades. Results Age-based framing evidenced a significantly higher increase in negativity (15%) compared to role-based framing (4%). We found a significant interaction effect between framing (age-based vs. role-based) and stereotypic content across two centuries (1800s and 1900s). The percentage of positive topics associated with role-based framing increased from 71% in the 1800s to 89% in the 1900s, with narratives of affection and wisdom becoming more prevalent. Conversely, the percentage of positive topics for age-based framing decreased from 82% to 38% over time, with narratives of burden, illness and death growing more prevalent. Discussion and Implications We argue for a more role-centric approach when framing aging such that age ceases to be the chief determinant in how older adults are viewed in society.

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

“…Both mass media and societal campaigns could therefore include an educational component to equip members of the public with a more accurate understanding of older adults and aging in general. Societal campaigns could target magazines and TV where ageism levels are the highest by framing aging in a way that takes into account both the gains and losses inherent in the aging process [52]. Although a certain number of older adults are at risk of becoming frail during their later years, there is also evidence indicating that overall physical functioning of older adults has improved over time [64].…”

“…The focus on single sources is likely due to the lack of suitable large-scale datasets and methods to interrogate them. Recent grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided unprecedented corpora, and scholars have adapted computational linguistics methods to analyze these databases for societal stereotypes [47][48][49][50][51][52], which we will leverage for the current study.…”

“…log (2) = 0.30103. This is a well-established application of computational linguistics to study stereotypes in other studies [47][48][49][50][51][52].…”

“…For example, 'frail' and 'dementing' are rated as very negative while 'caring' and 'happy' are rated as very positive. Ratings were done by two independent gerontology researchers-consistent with similar corpus studies [47][48][49][50][51][52]-and the inter-rater reliability using Cronbach's alpha was 0.972 (95% CI: 0.946, 0.986). Age stereotype scores were created by calculating the mean of all scores for the respective corpora using this mixed-method approach that integrated the rigor of text analytics and qualitative depth as exemplified in the coding process.…”

Implementing an Individual-Centric Discharge Process across Singapore Public Hospitals

“…Cultural differences that permeate daily life [33][34][35] are accentuated and may nuance participants' responses to interventions. Nevertheless, differences matter only if they make a difference-community nurses and healthcare workers need a different set of skills and cultural aptitude to deal with risks and complexity [36][37][38][39]. In essence, human capital is an important cog in the implementation wheel; hence, it requires a fundamental re-think of personnel selection, competency frameworks, and development pathways for community nursing.…”