Public Perceptions of Older People A literature review

Towards Old People Scale (Kogan 1961), The Ageing Semantic Differential
Scale (Rosencranz & McNevin 1969), and Palmore’s Facts on Ageing Quizzes
(Palmore 1977, 1981).
7.4 Mixed perceptions of older people and ageing
A substantial body of literature exists which examines age-related perceptions
not least in relation to perceptions of older people (Gellis et al. 2003). Overall,
previous research in this field has tended to draw on and then compare and
contrast the perceptions towards older people within different societal groups,
such as children and students. Research into public perceptions of older
people and ageing has traditionally been based on the assumption that
negative attitudes are widespread (Butler 1969) with numerous studies
reporting negative views of older people and ageing (e.g. Kite et al. 2005;
Arnold-Cathalifaud et al. 2008; Allan & Johnson 2009). Nosek et al. (2002)
found that negative implicit attitudes towards older people relative to young
people were, on average, the strongest of any obtained in their study,
including attitudes toward race and gender stereotypes. Furthermore, many of
these more negative views tend to be reported by younger age groups (Kite
et al. 2005; Woolf 2006; Cottle & Glover 2007). These negative views will be
examined in greater detail throughout the paper.
Despite the fact that Arnold-Cathalifaud et al. (2008) maintained that there
are few exceptions to these negative responses to older people and ageing, a
number of recent studies have reported overall positive or at least neutral
attitudes. For example, Fernia and colleagues (2008) reported that from a
small sample of children in the US, approximately 75% of 8-9 year old
children gave either neutral or positive descriptions of older people. Similarly,
in Taiwan, Yen et al. (2009) examined attitudes of nursing and medical
students towards older people and found a tendency towards positive
attitudes for this cohort. Consistent with these findings, Tan et al. (2004)
studied Chinese university students’ perceptions of older people and found
that overall, they also expressed positive or, at the very least, neutral
attitudes toward older people. These findings concur with recent research
conducted in other countries such as in the US, the UK and in Sweden (e.g.
Soderhamn et al. 2001; Kaempfer et al. 2002; Cummings & Galambos 2003;
Fitzgerald et al. 2003; Laditka et al. 2004; Moriello et al. 2005; Snyder 2005;
Brown et al. 2008; Hughes et al. 2008; Narayan 2008; Voogt et al. 2008).
Similarly, studies have also reported that older people have been perceived as
11