Three Decades of Research on Ageism

Abstract

A perspective from the preeminent researcher. My research on ageism has it roots in my research on racism. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I wrote my master's thesis on Introduction of Negroes into White Departments (1955). During the summers, I worked in the Chicago stockyards to make ends meet. In addition to becoming acutely aware of the from the stockyards, I became aware of the stench from the racism shown by many of my fellow workers who resisted the introduction of blacks into their lily-white departments. So I resorted to the method known as participant observation to collect material for my thesis, in which I concluded that racism tended to diminish over time after the introduction of Negroes into the workplace. When I came back to Duke University (my alma mater) and started teaching courses on both race relations and aging, I noticed how similar the stereotypes about blacks were to diose about old people. Bodi the process and the content of those stereotypes gave me pause. So I started doing some research on ageist stereotypes (Palmore, 1969) at about the same time Buder coined the term ageism (Buder, 1969) (see article by Buder, this issue.) As part of this research into ageism, I began collecting jokes about aging and analyzed the stereotypes they reflected (Palmore, 1971). Little did I know that this first analysis of ageism in humor would lead to an entire subspecialty within the study of ageism (Nahemow, McCluskey-Fawcett, and McGhee, 1986). The conclusions of that content analysis have been largely corroborated by subsequent studies using a variety of methods: * The majority of humor about the aged shows ageist attitudes, some is ambivalent, and very little shows positive attitudes. * Certain stereotypes tend to predominate-loss of physical or mental abilities; loss of attractiveness; loss of sexual ability or interest; and age concealment. * Expressions of humor about old women tend to be more common and more negative than those about old men. * Humor about aging may have several different functions, some positive and some negative. EQUALITY INDEX About the same time as I was conducting my humor research, Frank Whittington and I developed a way of statistically measuring the effects of ageism, racism, and sexism utilizing data from the U.S. Census (Palmore and Whittington, 1970). We called it the Equality Index, or EI, because it measures the degree of similarity in any given characteristic between any two categories of people. It is actually the proportion of overlap between the frequency distributions of two categories of people (such as aged and nonaged) on a characteristic (such as employment or income). We assumed that a major explanation for discrepancies between these categories was some kind of discrimination against the numerically inferior category. When we compared the effects of ageism with those of racism and sexism using the EI (Palmore and Manton, 1973), we found the following: * The greatest difference between groups (that is, the lowest EI) in amount of education received was found between old and young, rather than between races or between sexes. The same is true of number of weeks worked. * When two or three of the factors (age, race, and sex) were combined, the effects were generally additive (double or triple jeopardy). * Sexism had stronger effects on income than did ageism. * The effects of racism were diminishing faster than those of sexism and ageism (between 1950 and 1970). THE FACTS ON AGING QUIZ As a way of trying to capture students' interest on the first day of class, by showing them how many misconceptions they had, I also developed a twenty-five-item true/false quiz that I called the Facts on Aging Quiz. This was so effective that I published some results from using it with undergraduate students, graduate students, and colleagues (Palmore, 1977). …

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