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

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., grandparent) and rated them for stereotypic valence (negative to positive) over 21 decades. RESULTS: Age-based framing evidenced a significantly higher increase in negativity (15%) compared to role-based framing (4%). We found a significant interaction effect between framing (age-based vs. role-based) and stereotypic content across 2 centuries (1800s and 1900s). The percentage of positive topics associated with role-based framing increased from 71% in the 1800s to 89% in the 1900s, with narratives of affection and wisdom becoming more prevalent. Conversely, the percentage of positive topics for age-based framing decreased from 82% to 38% over time, with narratives of burden, illness, and death growing more prevalent. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: We argue for a more role-centric approach when framing aging such that age ceases to be the chief determinant in how older adults are viewed in society.