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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Narratives at work
— what can stories of older athletes do? | | Author(s) | Cassandra Phoenix, Meridith Griffin |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 33, no 2, February 2013 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, February 2013 |
| Pages | pp 243-266 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Sport ; Athletics ; Keeping fit ; Sociology, Social Science ; Memory and Reminiscence ; Attitudes to the old of general public. |
| Annotation | Previous research has shown that young adults tend to identify and reinforce negative stereotypes of growing older. They can express both fear and trepidation regarding the bodily changes that occur with advancing age. With this in mind, the authors draw upon the theoretical framework in A W Frank's 'Letting stories breathe: a socionaratology' (2010) to examine the work that stories can do. They take as a working example the impact that stories of ageing told by master athletes might have upon young adults, specifically, their perceptions of (self-)ageing. Three focus groups were carried out with the young adults to examine their perceptions of (self-)ageing prior to and following their viewing of a digital story portraying images and narratives of mature, natural ('drug-free') bodybuilders. The authors' analysis pointed to a number of specific capacities that stories of master athletes might have, namely the potential to re-open young adults' sense of narrative foreclosure, the stretching and expanding of existing imagined storylines, and the increasing availability of narrative options. They propose that understanding what stories can do, what they can do best, and the narrative environments that help and hinder this process are essential if programmes and policies are to produce the results that are wanted. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-130118202 A |
| Classmark | HT: HU: CE: S: DB: TOB |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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