Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Lloyd's Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Gerontologist. 2022 Apr 20;62(4):589-597. doi: 10.1093/geront/gnab108.
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.
We combined the Corpus of Historical American English with the Corpus of Contemporary American English to create a 600-million-word data set-the largest historical corpus of American English with over 150,000 texts collected from newspapers, magazines, fiction, and nonfiction. 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.
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 2 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.
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.
老年人的衰老轨迹呈现出更大的多样性。这促使世界卫生组织和美国退休人员协会重新定义衰老。我们比较了基于角色和基于年龄的老年人框架，时间跨度超过传统方法的范围，并阐明了它们各自的情感和叙述。
我们将美国历史英语语料库与当代美国英语语料库相结合，创建了一个 6 亿字的数据集——这是美国英语历史上最大的语料库，其中包含超过 15 万篇文本，这些文本来自报纸、杂志、小说和非小说类作品。我们整理了基于年龄的术语（如“老年人”）和基于角色的术语（如“祖父母”）的顶级描述符，并在 21 个十年内对它们的刻板印象效价（从消极到积极）进行了评分。
与基于角色的框架相比，基于年龄的框架的消极性增加了 15%，这一证据明显更高。我们发现，在 2 个世纪（19 世纪和 20 世纪）中，框架（基于年龄与基于角色）和刻板印象内容之间存在显著的交互效应。与基于角色的框架相关的积极主题的百分比从 19 世纪的 71%增加到 20 世纪的 89%，情感和智慧的叙述变得更加普遍。相反，基于年龄的框架的积极主题的百分比随着时间的推移从 82%下降到 38%，负担、疾病和死亡的叙述变得更加普遍。
我们主张在框架老龄化时采用更加以角色为中心的方法，使得年龄不再是社会看待老年人的主要决定因素。
