Attitudes About Aging and Gender Among Young, Middle Age, and Older College-Based Students

Psychometric properties of the Negative Stereotypes Towards Aging Questionnaire (CENVE) among a sample of Portuguese adults

“…In fact, educational level was the only discriminant sociodemographic characteristic of aging stereotypes. Contrary to other studies (Menéndez et al, 2016), neither age nor sex (Laditka, Fisher, Laditka, & Segal, 2004) was significant.…”

Multiple standards of aging: gender-specific age stereotypes in different life domains

“…Whereas previous findings show that older adults rate other older adults more favorably (Gluth et al 2010;Laditka et al 2004), our study (Kornadt and Rothermund 2011) already yielded evidence that life domain might moderate this effect: Even though overall, older adults provided more positive ratings of older persons, there were also life domains where young people gave higher ratings of older persons (such as religiosity, personality), whereas there were no age group differences in other domains (such as leisure, finances). Furthermore, since most of the previous studies were conducted several years ago, and some of them relied mostly on college students, it is still unclear whether there might be age-or cohort-related differences in the ratings of older men and women stemming from possible changes in the perception of gender roles that have occurred in the last two or three decades (e.g., Swazina et al 2004).…”

“…Even though there are studies showing that ''old age'' is perceived to start earlier for women (Barrett and von Rohr 2008;Kite and Wagner 2002), that women hold younger age identities than men to protect their selves from devaluation (Barrett 2005), and that in some studies older women are actually evaluated more negatively on factors including competence and appearance (e.g., Canetto et al 1995;Deutsch et al 1986), there are also studies demonstrating that older women might actually be perceived more favorably in general (Narayan 2008;Laditka et al 2004) or at least in some domains: For instance, older women are rated more positively when it comes to attributes that are related to nurturance or social competence, neatness, and care (Canetto et al 1995)-an effect that might be explained by the fact that those domains represent traditional ''warm'' gender roles. More astonishingly though, in their meta-analysis, Kite et al (2005) reported that older females are judged even more positively with regard to competence than older men, which speaks for a more differentiated view.…”

“…Some studies that find differences in ratings of older men and women show that women rate older persons more favorably in general (Bodner et al 2012;DeArmond et al 2006;Deutsch et al 1986), some find that this applies only for the ratings of older women (Laditka et al 2004), and yet others do not find any gender differences at all (Grant et al 2002). We therefore do not have any specific hypotheses for the interaction of participant and target gender.…”

Origins of Ageism at the Individual Level

“…Although changes during the lifespan are gradual and continuous, in the theoretical and empirical literature it is common to divide the adult population into three main age groups: young adults (from 18 to 34-39 years), middle-aged adults (from 35-40 to 59-65 years), and older adults (aged 60-68+) (e.g., Bodner et al 2012;Cherry and Palmore 2008;Laditka et al 2004).…”