Cargando…
Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters
the deeply entrenched biases that people hold about old age—is a persistent social problem that intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The harmful physical, emotional, and cognitive health consequences of individual-level age bias are well-documented, with most studies operationalizing ageism as...
Autor principal: | |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Ltd.
2023
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9678335/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36424283 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115501 |
_version_ | 1784833969758404608 |
---|---|
author | Carr, Deborah |
author_facet | Carr, Deborah |
author_sort | Carr, Deborah |
collection | PubMed |
description | the deeply entrenched biases that people hold about old age—is a persistent social problem that intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The harmful physical, emotional, and cognitive health consequences of individual-level age bias are well-documented, with most studies operationalizing ageism as an older adult's personal encounters with age discrimination, self-perceptions of their own aging, and internalized negative beliefs about old age. However, the impacts of community-level age bias on older adults' well-being have received less attention. This commentary reviews recent evidence (Kellogg et al.,) showing that county-level explicit age bias is associated with lower mortality rates among older adults, with effects limited to older adults residing in counties with relatively younger populations. Effects were not detected in counties with relatively older populations, or for implicit age bias. These counterintuitive findings require further exploration, including the use of more fine-grained measures of community-level ageism, attention to the role of gentrification in communities, and the development of new measures of structural ageism, drawing on approaches used to study the impacts of structural racism. Data science approaches, including the use of social media data in tandem with mortality data, may reveal how age bias affects older adults. Communities are especially important to older adults, who spend much of their time in areas immediately proximate to their homes. As more individuals age in place, and as federal funding for home-based and community services (HCBS) increases, researchers should identify which community-level characteristics, including age bias, undermine or enhance late-life well-being. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9678335 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Elsevier Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-96783352022-11-22 Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters Carr, Deborah Soc Sci Med Article the deeply entrenched biases that people hold about old age—is a persistent social problem that intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The harmful physical, emotional, and cognitive health consequences of individual-level age bias are well-documented, with most studies operationalizing ageism as an older adult's personal encounters with age discrimination, self-perceptions of their own aging, and internalized negative beliefs about old age. However, the impacts of community-level age bias on older adults' well-being have received less attention. This commentary reviews recent evidence (Kellogg et al.,) showing that county-level explicit age bias is associated with lower mortality rates among older adults, with effects limited to older adults residing in counties with relatively younger populations. Effects were not detected in counties with relatively older populations, or for implicit age bias. These counterintuitive findings require further exploration, including the use of more fine-grained measures of community-level ageism, attention to the role of gentrification in communities, and the development of new measures of structural ageism, drawing on approaches used to study the impacts of structural racism. Data science approaches, including the use of social media data in tandem with mortality data, may reveal how age bias affects older adults. Communities are especially important to older adults, who spend much of their time in areas immediately proximate to their homes. As more individuals age in place, and as federal funding for home-based and community services (HCBS) increases, researchers should identify which community-level characteristics, including age bias, undermine or enhance late-life well-being. Elsevier Ltd. 2023-03 2022-11-21 /pmc/articles/PMC9678335/ /pubmed/36424283 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115501 Text en © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Carr, Deborah Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters |
title | Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters |
title_full | Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters |
title_fullStr | Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters |
title_full_unstemmed | Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters |
title_short | Ageism and late-life mortality: How community matters |
title_sort | ageism and late-life mortality: how community matters |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9678335/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36424283 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115501 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT carrdeborah ageismandlatelifemortalityhowcommunitymatters |