Robert Butler Research Articles

Combatting Ageism with Science: Robert Butler's Shaping of the National Institute on Aging.

The physician, scholar, and activist Robert Butler devoted much of his life to trying to end ageism in order to create a society that provides older persons with equal rights and opportunities. His passion for fighting ageism led to his becoming the founding director of the National Institute of Aging (NIA) and set the stage for many of its achievements during the past 50 years. This article explores how Butler first became committed to overcoming ageism, how he made a strong case for setting up NIA as a headquarters to combat ageism with science, and how he launched NIA as a multidisciplinary organization that could draw on research, training, and public policy as weapons against ageism. Finally, this article highlights how Butler, through his anti-ageism activities in later life, personified the possibilities he had done so much to make available to older persons through his launch of NIA.

Editorial: Teaching children’s literature in the university: New perspectives and challenges for the future

Children’s literature is an area of frequent scholarship, reflecting its influential position in telling stories, developing literacy, and sharing knowledge in many cultures. At its best, children’s literature is transformative in the lives of children and their adult reading companions, and as such plays an important role in society. Indeed, in the last several decades, children’s literature has become an important focus of teaching and research in centres for literature and literary criticism, education, and library/information sciences in universities across the world. Much has been written about the historical undervaluing of children’s literature and research in this area (e.g., Nikolajeva, 2016). While there is considerable literature concerning the teaching of children’s literature in primary and secondary classrooms (e.g., Bland & Lütge, 2012; Arizpe & Styles, 2016; Ommundsen et al., 2021), there has been relatively little scholarship on the pedagogy involved in teaching children’s literature in a university setting with two notable exceptions. Teaching Children’s Fiction edited by Robert Butler (2006) presents eight chapters by experienced children’s literature teachers and scholars, mostly from Britain, concerning intellectual and educational traditions in children’s literature studies and teaching, sharing and discussion of teaching practices, and providing resources for teachers in this field. A Master Class in Children’s Literature, edited by April Bedford and Lettie Albright (2011), offers chapters in which children’s literature professors from across the United States of America share and reflect on their practice in relation to the structures of children’s literature courses, the characteristics and elements of children’s literature, and future trends and challenges in the teaching of children’s literature.

Dr. Robert Butler’s Legacy in Defining and Fighting Ageism

Robert N. Butler, MD (1927–2010), coined the term “ageism” in 1969 to define an age-driven bigotry that disengaged older persons from virtually all sectors of American life. As founding director of the National Institute of Aging, as head of the first geriatrics department in a US medical school, and as a trailblazing idea broker, Dr. Butler continually sought to make Americans aware about the insidious effects of ageism. He accomplished much in promoting education and research, but Dr. Butler’s personal and professional campaign to extirpate ageism remains his greatest legacy.

Creativity’s Impact on Aging and Health, 1970–2010

In the 1970, practitioners in the arts, aging, health, social work and allied therapeutic professions became pioneers in a newly formed movement of creative aging. Robert Butler’s “Why Survive? Growing Old in America” called for rethinking aging and the services needed to support the growing aging population. Barriers to restrictions and the lower expectations around how older people could live in their communities began to change. Opportunities for engagement in the humanities and the arts began to be tailored to support older people’s life style and to accommodate the sharing of their life experiences in new ways through partnerships with schools and senior centers. The rise of these practices promoted the first multi-year study of arts engagement impact on the health on older adults and a wave of publications and new research studies followed. These were the foundation for this strength-based initiative across the spectrum of aging.

Ageism and interactional (mis)alignment: Using micro-discourse analysis in the interpretation of everyday talk in a hair-salon

Abstract In the fifty years since Robert Butler coined the term, ageism remains one of the most widely-experienced forms of discrimination in Europe. Some forms of ageism seem overt and easy-to-identify; in many cases, though, it is invisible and deeply rooted in everyday life. This applies, too, to ageism-in-interaction, which, as I argue in this paper, can be very subtle, deeply embedded in a web of routines and expectations generated over a longer interactional history. I illustrate this embeddedness of ageism-in-interaction by focussing, as a case-study, on an encounter in a hair-salon between an 83-year-old woman and her stylist, aspects of which we might initially be tempted to attribute to the stylist’s orientations to the client’s (older) age. However, as I show, closer scrutiny of the emergent interaction, combined with progressive widening of the analysis to encompass data outside this focal exchange, suggests more nuanced understandings of what is going on. As I also aim to show, the nose-to-data attention to the emergent interactions in this case-study, informed by conversation analysis and combined with wider ethnographic knowledge, is the tool-kit we need to reveal the less visible instances of ageism-in-interaction.

RACISM AND AGEISM: ADDRESSING PATIENT AND PHYSICIAN BARRIERS TO IMPROVE OLDER ADULT CARE: Session 316

Robert Butler, the founding director of the National Institute on Aging first coined the term ageism. He included three domains in the definition, i.e., prejudicial attitudes, discriminatory practices, and institutional practices that negatively impact older adults. By some estimates, ageism is thought to be the most common “-ism” in the world. It has shown to affect the well-being of older adults in terms of their access to healthcare, employment, and psychological well-being. However, there is little done to address ageism in medical student education, for example, only 10% of medical schools require a geriatric medicine clinical experience and few include geriatric medicine in their didactic curricula. To address this gap, the session will aim to define ageism, contributors to ageist beliefs and practices, and then propose specific ways in which to overcome ageism including educational curricula, cultural approaches, and advocacy. On the other hand, healthcare providers can be recipients of prejudicial beliefs and behaviors by patients. In a recent survey, 70% of African American and 69% of Asian physicians reported having heard biased comments from patients. Nonetheless, educational curricula and training provide little guidance on how a physician could respond to racial intolerance. Not addressing these situations can cause significant barriers to providing care to patients and can contribute to burnout. During the session we will review the existing evidence about racism towards physicians and propose means by which this could be addressed by clinicians. Participants will have an opportunity to role play and discuss concrete steps to address racism. As with ageism, it will include consideration of educational curricula, cultural approaches, and advocacy.

«L’età d’oro della Vita». La vecchiaia di Oriana Fallaci

From Tithonus to the Struldbrugs of Swift, the old age is seen as a phase of decline, of decay, of exclusion from active life, which generates conditions of need. Senility can become even an influencing discrimination: in 1969 Robert Butler coined the term ageism and developed the theory of the phenomenon. So it is very surprising to see the optimism of Oriana Fallaci who observed: «They are fools those who refuse [the old age] and in order to refuse it they make the facelift, they dress up like a twenty-yearold, they cheat on age. Silly and ungrateful. […] The oldness is a beautiful age. The golden age of Life» [IA 149-150]. The tone marvels even more if you think about the cancer against which the Florentine journalist fought for years. It therefore seems interesting to analyze the reason for such serenity, despite the thanatic shadow.

AGEISM IN THE UNITED STATES AS A PARADOX AND OPPORTUNITY FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Twelve years ago, Robert Butler argued in Ageism in America that combatting ageism in a matter of human and civil rights. However, ageism has not yet been overcome. Instead, evidence suggests that what has developed in the United States is an age stereotype paradox: Research demonstrates that negative age stereotypes have been increasing, even though a number of factors (e.g., passage of anti-age-discrimination laws) suggest that age stereotypes should become more positive. This presentation will focus on four age-stereotype paradox domains: health, intergenerational contact, legislation and social climate. I will explore why the paradox matters, its causes and how it can become an opportunity for social change.

The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century eds. by Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel

Reviewed by: The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century eds. by Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel Michael Germana Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel, eds. The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. 360 pp. $27.85. Ralph Ellison's œuvre and scholarship on his life and work have each grown considerably since his death in 1994. Previously uncollected and/or unpublished essays and works of fiction by Ellison have appeared in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), an edition of the Book II typescript of Ellison's unfinished second novel, Juneteenth (1999), Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), and the most complete version of Ellison's second novel manuscript yet to be assembled, Three Days before the Shooting… (2010). Interest in Ellison among literary scholars has similarly increased in recent years. As a consequence, more books and essays about the author have appeared since the turn of the millennium than were published in the preceding five decades. Twenty-first-century scholarship on Ellison hasn't been entirely encomiastic, however. A small but influential chorus of critics remains fixated on the author's shortcomings, whether real or imagined, as a writer and an activist. Foremost among these critics are Arnold Rampersad and Barbara Foley whose critical works, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007) and Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (2010), respectively, express disillusion with, if not disappointment in the author. Together, they make a Procrustean bed for the National Book Award winner. Foley contends that Ellison, the author, abandoned a more pointed (and, in her estimation, more empathetic) materialist critique in Invisible Man when he revised the novel into its published form. Rampersad, by contrast, faults Ellison, the man, for not being expansive enough in his social interactions with and encouragement of black artists and intellectuals. Each takes a negative and fundamentally myopic view of the author's life and work. Foley dismisses Ellison's shift from proletarian realism to "depoliticized mythic individualism" (83) as a sellout to Cold War liberal ideology in general, and to its literary critical adherents in particular. Rampersad, in turn, (ab)uses Ellison's social calendar to draw misleading inferences about the author's perceived lack of political engagement, and to suggest that Ellison was too busy smoking cigars in the Century Club and currying favor with powerful whites to fulfill a legacy that the publication of Invisible Man (1952) ought to have inaugurated. Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel's The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century constitutes a collective rejoinder to these views—views that, as Robert Butler and Ross Posnock show in their contributions to the collection, dogged Ellison even at the pinnacle of his success. Rather than take the author to task for what could or should have been, the volume's contributors portray Ellison as a visionary, not only of the post-segregation period, but also of twenty-first-century American society and culture. The result is an ambitious collection of essays that, in the esteem of its editors, "represent the most far-reaching and original assessment of Ralph Ellison's entire career and body of work ever published" (30). [End Page 151] This is a bold claim, but it is also an accurate one. Indeed, The New Territory is an important work of Ellison scholarship that evinces a generosity of scope, sense of possibility, and complexity of analysis befitting of the author's corpus. It promises to do for Ellison's reputation what Foley and Rampersad have done to it. The fourteen essays that comprise the collection are, with the exception of John Callahan's speculative but rewarding conclusion, divided into three parts: one on new approaches to Invisible Man, a second on Ellison's unfinished second novel, and a third on Ellison's transhistorical view of American culture. The collection is worth obtaining for the essays on Three Days alone. Here, for the first time, is a substantial cross-section of work by scholars earnestly grappling with Ellison's unfinished tome, posthumously...

The Life Review and the (Alternative) Politics of Ageing

Referencing Diana Athill's memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter (2015), this article organises an analysis of the BBC television dramas A Cream Cracker under the Settee (1988) and She's Been Away (1989) through the frame of Robert Butler's concept of the life review (1975) which, he argues, is a process through which unresolved conflicts and past experiences return to reflective consciousness, thus enabling resolution and recalibration of relationships and past events in the elderly. Viewed in the light of Butler's ideas, Athill and the 75-year-old female protagonist of each narrative suggest rarely depicted levels of agency and ongoing identity formation in the elderly. Although very different in tone, aesthetic appeal, narrative structure and class location, each drama similarly explores the inner lives of elderly women and reveals personal truths hitherto unacknowledged by them which also offer a reflection on wider society. In each case, the elderly protagonist can be seen as a subject in process with an identity formation that does not end in late life, while the life review also works to lift the veil between the dominant culture that largely wants to deny processes of ageing, and therefore death, and the lived experience of those undergoing the process.

Attitudes of Social Work Students towards the Ageism

Ageism which is concept first used in 1969 by Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, can be defined as a process of systematic stereotyping and discrimination against people because they are (Butler, 1995: 35). Turkey's population is growing older and the elderly constitutes an important target group especially in terms of the social work profession. Therefore determining the causes of discriminatory attitudes towards the elderly is extremely important in terms of quality of services provided to the elderly. Starting from this view, the aim of this research is to determine the attitudes of social work students towards the ageism in Turkey and the sociodemographic characteristics that affect these attitudes. The research population consists of social work students in all active departments of social work in 2012- 2013 academic year in Turkey; the sample consists of 990 social work students from different universities such as Hacettepe, Selcuk, Ankara, Adnan Menderes, Ba
kent, Yalova, Kocaeli and KTO Karatay. 610 of the participants are female and 380 are male. The research data were obtained by using personal information questionnaire which is developed by the researchers and the “Ageism Attitude Scale” which is developed by Vefikulucay Yilmaz and Terziolu (2011: 267). As result of the study, female students have more positive attitudes than male students in the “restricting life of the elderly” sub-dimension of Ageism Attitude Scale; students who are 21 and older have more positive attitudes than students between the age of 17 and 20; students who are in the first grade have more positive attitudes than students in the third and fourth grade in the “negative ageism” sub-dimension; students who say that elderly relatives are important in their lives have more positive attitudes than others in the “restricting life of the elderly”subdimension and students who have taken course on old age have more negative attitudes than students who didn’t have any courses about it. In conclusion, when considering Turkey has started to increase the proportion of elderly in the population, it is important for social workers, which is one of the occupation that undertake the task of planning and providing services for the elderly population, to be informed about old age and to improve the skills for working with the elderly.

The White House Conference on Aging: 20 Years Ago

The White House Conference on Aging: 20 Years Ago

From Ageism to the Longevity Revolution: Robert Butler, Pioneer

From Ageism to the Longevity Revolution: Robert Butler, Pioneer

Celebrating fifty years of research and applications in reminiscence and life review: State of the art and new directions

Fifty years ago, psychiatrist Robert Butler (1963) published an influential article on the recollection and evaluation of personal memories in later life. We discuss the major insights and applications in psychological gerontology that were inspired by Butler. Reminiscence and life review serve to create bonds between people, to cope with important life events, and to attribute meaning to life. We discuss a heuristic framework that relates reminiscence and life review to individual and contextual characteristics as well as to psychological resources and mental health and well-being. The increasing evidence is discussed that different types of interventions can effectively promote mental health and well-being in later life. We propose that processes of reminiscence and life review need further study. This can partly be achieved within the current research tradition by longitudinal studies and good trials that also address the processes accounting for effects of interventions. Synergy with psychological studies on autobiographical remembering and life stories will provide further innovation in the field, as these studies provide new methods and evidence of processes linked to the recollection and evaluation of personal memories.

The Future of Old Age Income Security

Global ageing and urbanization are among the major challenges facing countries around the world. This paper, based on a revised version of the Robert Butler Memorial Lecture delivered at the International Centre Global Alliance Symposium on ‘The Future of Ageing’ on 21 June 2013 in Singapore, focuses on three aspects. First, it examines the global ageing trends and their implications based on the 2012 Revision of the UNDESA’s World Population Prospects projections. Second, it summarizes selected studies projecting additional expenditure on pensions and health care which may be needed in the future. The projections suggest that additional resources which would need to be generated, at the time when medium term growth prospects are subdued, would be significant, in the range of 2 to 5 percent of GDP. Given constrained tax policy autonomy and high locational elasticity of businesses and individuals, raising resources, i.e. funding for financing aging, and designing financing-mix between various sources and sectors, have acquired greater urgency. So the third section briefly outlines how countries could address funding and financing challenges, including developing capacities to access non-conventional sources such as making more productive use of state assets.

The Emergence of a Positive Gerontology: From Disengagement to Social Involvement

The latter part of the 20th century was a period characterized by a fundamental transition in scholarship on activity and the aging process. Theory emphasizing the inevitable decline of human capacity was gradually replaced with concepts stressing positive, multidimensional views of aging. In this article, we highlight the key contributors and trace the origins and overlapping themes of successful aging, productive aging, and civic engagement in later life: 3 examples of scholarship representing a "positive" gerontology. Rowe and Kahn's model of successful aging highlights the interplay between social engagement with life, health, and functioning for a positive aging experience. Productive aging, led by Robert Butler, recognizes the previously underappreciated participation of older adults in activities such as volunteering, paid work, and caregiving, and generates interest in the individual and societal barriers to and benefits of participation. Civic engagement in later life raises public awareness about the need to involve older adults in the community, creates opportunities for participation, and generates further interest in the mutual benefit of participation for community beneficiaries and participants. Successful aging, productive aging, and civic engagement represent important contributions to the field of gerontology through applications to policy, advocacy, and theory development.

Special Issue on Productive Aging: Evidence and Opportunities for Occupational Therapy Practitioners

Special Issue on Productive Aging: Evidence and Opportunities for Occupational Therapy Practitioners

Time to end ageism in medical education

In 1969, Dr. Robert Butler published a seminal article describing “another form of bigotry,” which he termed “ageism.” Ageism, he wrote, reflects “a personal revulsion to and distaste for growing old, disease [and] disability.”1 At the time, Butler predicted that ageism would parallel

Use of the Term “Elderly”

The terms senile, demented, and aged are unfortunate terms once in common use among physical therapy personnel. While these terms have mostly disappeared, there is still a term in common use that needs to disappear, the term elderly. Terms tend to be convenient but suffer stereotyping through their generalization and lack of specificity. Thus, using the term elderly for a person who is robust and independent as well as for a person who is frail and dependent says little about the individual. Since older individuals become more heterogeneous with age, a specific descriptor such as elderly is inaccurate and misleading. For example, asked to describe an 82-year-old woman would provoke little agreement and much discussion based on personal experiences. Eighty-two-year-old women run marathons and 82-year-old women are bed ridden. Which is the accurate description? The term elderly is ageist. Ageist terms are those terms in which a stereotype is promulgated and treatment is delivered differently on the basis of age.1 Ageism, like racism and sexism, is a form of prejudice or prejudgment that shapes perceptions. Ageist terms tend to diminish older adults, yet ageism is rampant in health care, stereotyping older folks as sick, frail, and physically dependent. Ageism can result in less care, less robust care, and negatively affect outcomes.2 None of us would demonstrate ageism by using patronizing speech when interacting with older adults or talking baby-talk. Yet, the use of the term elderly persists. In a survey of major medical journals from 1996 through 2006, all used the term elderly and 3 of the 4 major geriatric journals preferred the term elderly over older adults at a rate of 4:1 over general journals.3 The term elderly lacks an equal and opposite term pederly; unlike geriatrics versus pediatrics that describes an area of medicine and health care. The term elderly is often used to describe frail individuals; without applying the well-known and valid criteria of frailty.4 Furthermore, older adults do not like the term elderly applied to themselves, even if they use the term to describe someone else! A European survey asking older individuals their preferred term indicated a preference for older or senior and strongly rejected terms aged, old, and most strongly elderly. In 1995, the United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights of Older Persons rejected the term elderly in preference for the term older persons.5 Additionally, a media guide issued by The International Longevity Center, headed then by Robert Butler, recommended the term older adults over senior and elderly. The report states, “After all, we don't refer to people under 50 as ‘junior citizens'.”6 It is time our language use matures. Using terms that are precise, accurate, value-free and that older adults prefer makes a good sense. The term older adult or older person is respectful and should be the standard term in this journal. —Dale Avers, DPT, PhD Marybeth Brown, PT, PhD, FAPTA Kevin K. Chui, PT, DPT, PhD, OCS, GCS Rita A. Wong, PT, PhD Michelle Lusardi, PT, DPT, PhD

America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology (review)

Reviewed by: America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology Robert Butler Cynthia H. Tolentino. America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 125 pp. $22.50. This carefully researched, compact study examines how three writers, Richard Wright, Carlos Bulosan, and Jade Snow Wong, were strongly influenced by modern sociological research and theory but needed, finally, to challenge and transcend them in order to articulate fully their own unique visions of American racial and ethnic life. Central to Tolentino’s book are the following propositions: 1) Sociology in the twentieth century was the dominant knowledge producer about race and ethnicity, becoming the “official national discourse” (25) on these matters; 2) “Canonical Sociology,” formed by the Chicago School at the turn of the century and further developed by influential sociologists such as Gunnar Myrdal and Emory Bogardus during the Cold War, helped to shape and advance American foreign policy in Europe, Asia, and Africa; and 3) creative artists such as Wright, Bulosan, and Wong had to break away from sociological knowledge and methods, finding them excessively abstract and simplistic. Her chapter on Wright is the strongest part of the book, because her thesis squares best with his actual literary practice, especially in his masterwork, Native Son. She grants that Wright was deeply influenced by sociologists such as Robert Park, Horace Cayton, and St. Clair Drake, arguing that they provided him with a clear, coherent means of understanding his traumatic experiences in both the rural South and the urban North. She also effectively links Wright’s interest in sociology to his equally strong attraction to Communism, since both enabled him to engage in an organized search for truth and imagine systematic ways to reengineer social and political reality. Tolentino quite rightly points out, as many others have also done, that Wright felt constrained, both as a person and as an artist, by the limits of sociological theory and Marxist dogma, finding them at odds with his own vision of African American life. As he stressed in both “I Tried to Be a Communist” and “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” he was wary of any abstract approaches to human experience which could prevent him from truthfully examining the full richness, complexity, and density of black life. [End Page 534] He became what Paul Gilroy characterized as “a new kind of black author” (5) who, in Tolentino’s words, practiced “an independent and black radicalism” (12). This view of Wright is supported by a detailed and nuanced reading of Native Son. The remainder of Tolentino’s study places two autobiographical narratives, Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter in the context of the cultural and political milieu of the Cold War. She argues convincingly that American foreign policy shaped by the State Department made elaborate attempts to use the work of professional artists to strengthen our image in Europe, Asia, and the Third World as a means of furthering U. S. interests as a global power intent on achieving hegemony in those regions. (This policy advanced the careers of writers whose works could serve as evidence of American racial reform and progress, while repressing the careers of those like Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, who were viewed by the State Department as dangerous subversives and a threat to our image abroad.) Tolentino views Bulosan and Wong as strongly influenced by post-World War II sociology that held an emphatically assimilationist vision in championing “model minority” narratives, which claimed that the problems of minorities such as the Chinese and Filipinos would eventually be solved when they integrated fully with mainstream American culture. Just as she argued that Wright achieved artistic maturity by breaking away from sociological models and becoming an independent radical, Tolentino maintains that Bulosan and Wong ultimately rebelled against their sociological training by staking out positions as independent artists. But a stronger argument needs to be made to support this position. Her analysis of America Is in the Heart and Fifth Chinese Daughter, unlike her discussion of Native Son, lacks the detail and nuance needed to support the weight of her claims for these two...