ATTITUDES TOWARD THE ELDERLY: IDENTIFYING PROBLEMATIC USAGE OF AGEIST AND OVEREXTENDED TERMINOLOGY IN RESEARCH INSTRUCTIONS

Abstract

Many problems have recently been identified and discussed concerning the assessment of attitudes toward the elderly. One problem is the use of ageist and overextended terminology to describe people in late adulthood, particularly in research studies that have attempted to measure attitudes toward that age segment. The present paper posits that using such stereotypical language during the research process, especially during the data gathering process, creates bias in attitudes toward individuals in late adulthood and affects the accuracy of results obtained from those studies. With that position as a guide, the purpose of this study was to uncover possible differences and effects that stereotypical descriptions of the elderly population may cause by using ageist terminology in any part of the data gathering process, specifically during the instruction and questionnaire phases of the study. Using Polizzi's (April, 2001) refined version of the Aging Semantic Differential on a sample of 142 undergraduate students, it was hypothesized that the two ageist descriptive categories (i.e., "old" and "elderly) would contribute to significantly different attitude scores than the "70-85 years of age" category. This hypothesis was supported when several significant differences were found among the three descriptive categories. A second hypothesis stated that attitude scores would be significantly more positive toward people in the "70-85 years of the age" category than the other two categories. This hypothesis was also supported. The descriptive category known as "old" was the least positively viewed group, while the "70-85 years of age" category was viewed the most positively. It was concluded that ageist language does indeed have an effect on attitude scores. Implications of the findings, as well as recommendations for future research, are cited.