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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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'I know it exists ... but I haven't experienced it personally'
— older Canadian men's perceptions of ageism as a distant social problem | | Author(s) | Laura Hurd Clarke, Alexandra Korotchenko |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 36, no 8, September 2016 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, September 2016 |
| Pages | pp 1757-1773 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Older men ; Attitude ; Ageism ; Qualitative Studies ; Canada. |
| Annotation | This paper examines how older men perceive, experience and internalise ageist prejudice in the context of their everyday lives. The authors draw on in-depth interviews with 29 community-dwelling Canadian men aged 65-89. Although one-third of the participants were unfamiliar with the term ageism, the majority felt that age-based discrimination was prevalent in Canadian society. Indicating that they themselves had not been personally subjected to ageism, the men considered age-based discrimination to be a socially distant problem. The men explained their perceived immunity to ageism in terms of their youthful attitudes and active lifestyles. The men identified three groups who they considered to be particularly vulnerable to age-based discrimination, namely women, older workers, and frail older people residing in institutions. At the same time, the majority of the participants had internalised a variety of ageist and sexist stereotypes. Indeed, the men assumed that later life was inevitably a time of physical decline and dependence, and accepted as fact that older adults were grumpy, poor drivers, unable to learn new technologies and, in the case of older women, sexually unattractive. In this way, a tension existed between the men's assertion that ageism did not affect their lives and their own internalisation of ageist stereotypes. The authors consider their findings in relation to the theorising about ageism and hegemonic masculinity. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-160820209 A |
| Classmark | BC: DP: B:TOB: 3DP: 7S |
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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