Reframing Aging in Contemporary Politics: Building Momentum

Abstract

In 2014, eight of the nation’s leading aging-focused organizations formed an unprecedented partnership: the Leaders of Aging Organizations (LAO). The LAO’s common goal is to improve the public understanding of older people’s needs and contributions to society and, subsequently, to improve health and care for us all as we age. To achieve this, the LAO launched the Reframing Aging Initiative and contracted with a social change partner, the FrameWorks Institute, to conduct the research underpinning it. Currently, the work of the Reframing Aging Initiative is conducted by The Gerontological Society of America on behalf of the LAO to advance this research to meet the demands of advocates in the fields of health and aging research, practice, and policy. The FrameWorks Institute researchers conducted interviews with 21 experts in the field of aging to capture how they view and understand the field. Using the analysis of these interviews, FrameWorks then conducted 146 on-the-street interviews, a series of experimental surveys involving a nationally representative sample to test effectiveness of frames, and a series of qualitative tests to explore how the most effective frames work in conversational settings. Through the series of qualitative and quantitative studies, more than 12,000 people were included in this research. The FrameWorks Institute researchers used cognitive and linguistic anthropology theories to conduct the analysis and develop the framing recommendations. Readers are encouraged to read “Gauging Aging: Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understandings of Aging in America” and “Finding the Frame: An Empirical Approach to Reframing Aging and Ageism” to learn more about the research methods applied to develop the framing strategies for the Reframing Aging Initiative. Both can be accessed on the initiative’s webpage at reframingaging.org.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.