Culture Linked to Increasing Ageism During COVID-19: Evidence From a 10-Billion-Word Corpus Across 20 Countries

Reuben Ng · Ting Yu Joanne Chow · Wenshu Yang

65 citations0/0 files storedThe Journals of Gerontology Series B

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Aging and Gerontology Research Communication and COVID-19 Impact Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Older adults experience higher risks of getting severely ill from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), resulting in widespread narratives of frailty and vulnerability. We test: (a) whether global aging narratives have become more negative from before to during the pandemic (October 2019 to May 2020) across 20 countries; (b) model pandemic (incidence and mortality), and cultural factors associated with the trajectory of aging narratives. METHODS: We leveraged a 10-billion-word online-media corpus, consisting of 28 million newspaper and magazine articles across 20 countries, to identify nine common synonyms of "older adults" and compiled their most frequently used descriptors (collocates) from October 2019 to May 2020-culminating in 11,504 collocates that were rated to create a Cumulative Aging Narrative Score per month. Widely used cultural dimension scores were taken from Hofstede, and pandemic variables, from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. RESULTS: Aging narratives became more negative as the pandemic worsened across 20 countries. Globally, scores were trending neutral from October 2019 to February 2020, and plummeted in March 2020, reflecting COVID-19's severity. Prepandemic (October 2019), the United Kingdom evidenced the most negative aging narratives; peak pandemic (May 2020), South Africa took on the dubious honor. Across the 8-month period, the Philippines experienced the steepest trend toward negativity in aging narratives. Ageism, during the pandemic, was, ironically, not predicted by COVID-19's incidence and mortality rates, but by cultural variables: Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long-term Orientation. DISCUSSION: The strategy to reverse this trajectory lay in the same phenomenon that promoted it: a sustained global campaign-though, it should be culturally nuanced and customized to a country's context.

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References

2002Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations across Nations 2011Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context 2003Men, masculinity, and the contexts of help seeking.1995Implicit Theories and Their Role in Judgments and Reactions: A Word From Two Perspectives 1969Age-Ism: Another Form of Bigotry 2003New Frontiers in the Future of Aging: From Successful Aging of the Young Old to the Dilemmas of the Fourth Age 2020Older people and COVID‐19: Isolation, risk and ageism 2020Aging in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Avoiding Ageism and Fostering Intergenerational Solidarity

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2021News media narratives of Covid-19 across 20 countries: Early global convergence and later regional divergence 2022Ageism on Twitter during the COVID‐19 pandemic 2023Granfluencers on TikTok: Factors linked to positive self-portrayals of older adults on social media 2021The Impact of Aging Policy on Societal Age Stereotypes and Ageism 2022Hostility Toward Baby Boomers on TikTok

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