I wonder if robots will take care of me when I am old: Positive aging representations of professionals working in health promotion services

Abstract

How the social and institutional context is structured and represented by its actors has an impact on positive aging representations. This qualitative study explores professionals' views on positive aging, how they promote positive aging in their practice and what disparities occur between their discourses and the actual practice of promoting positive aging. Interviews were conducted with professionals from different active aging promotion services and analyzed with thematic coding. Findings show professionals hold negative views on aging while trying to promote positive views in their work, illustrating an existing theory-practice gap. Strategies used in practice can be integrated in existing agency models and inform interventions and active aging policies.

(De)Gendering Older Patients: Exploring Views on Aging and Older Patients in Romanian General Practitioners

“…Present findings lend support to previous literature showing that medical personnel tends to have rather negative images of old age (Walter et al, 2010;Craciun & Flick, 2015;Craciun, 2016). Having a negative image of aging may reflect on how they treat older patients and contribute to the maintenance of negative stereotypes related to old age (Craciun, 2016).…”

“…For instance, the analysis focused on how female and male GPs represented aging and how they performed gender in their practice of treating older women and men. Similarities and differences between female and male GPs were identified in order to identify typologies of patterns of interpretations and practices which were then analyzed in terms of their contexts of meaning following the model of previous research (Craciun & Flick, 2015). The identified themes were checked for reliability by two other research assistants.…”

“…A positive view of aging means that they see the potential for development and experiencing positive emotions in old age, while negative images of aging mean associating old age with illness and dependency (Levy, 2003;Wurm, Tomasik, & Tesch-Römer, 2010). Previous studies showed that health professionals had more negative images of aging (Walter et al, 2010;Craciun & Flick, 2015;Craciun, 2016). The present study wants to go further and explore whether GPs treat men and women differently Gender may play a role in how GPs relate to aging for several reasons.…”

“…Furthermore, older patients may be the target of double stereotyping and discrimination in terms of both age (Levy, 2003) and gender (Palència, 2014). The present article seeks to add to existing literature on aging representations in medical personnel (Liu, Norman, While, 2013;Walter, Flick, Neuber, Fischer, Hussein, Schwartz, 2010) and experiences of general practitioners with older patients (Craciun & Flick, 2015;Craciun, 2016;Flick, Garms-Homolova, Rönsch, 2012) by exploring how the gender of general practitioners plays a role in their aging representations and how they perceive older women versus older men as patients.…”

“…Medical treatment and communication imply not only providing accurate medical advice, but also transmitting ideas about positive aging (Craciun & Flick, 2015) or gender sensitive advice in old age (Reitinger & Beyer, 2010;Foster & Walker, 2014). Nevertheless, active aging policy recommendations (Lassen & Moreira, 2014) might not be easily integrated in busy medical schedules and ideas about active aging that might be accepted in Western contexts may not be popular in Eastern European contexts (Craciun, 2016).…”