Role-Based Framing of Older Adults Linked to Decreased Ageism Over 210 Years: Evidence From a 600-Million-Word Historical Corpus.

ABSTRACT:

Background and objectives

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.

Research design and methods

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

SUBMITTER: Ng R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9019650 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature