MEDIA PORTRAYALS OF OLDER ADULTS

Media Portrayals of Older Adults

Media Portrayals of Older Adults

Media portrayals contribute to the public's view of teenagers and to teenagers' views of themselves. Different media present very different pictures of elderly life. This paper considers media portrayals of older adults on television, in magazines, and on the Internet. Although research that looks specifically at older adults is relatively sparse, some reasonable, though sometimes time bound, conclusions can be drawn.

Older Adults as Portrayed on Television

Among the hundreds of content analyses of entertainment television, only a handful has focused on the portrayal of older adults. The dearth of research in this area is surprising given the strong rationale provided by historically dominant models in the media effects literature, notably Gerbner's cultivation theory and Bandura's social learning theory. The focus placed by cultivation research on the beliefs formed about others suggests a need to analyze the influence of TV's portrayal of older adults on the beliefs that both older adults form about themselves (Stern, 2008).

Bandura's focus on vicarious modeling suggests the need to analyze how TV's portrayal of older adults influences their own attitudes and behaviors: As experimental research has shown, older adults are more apt to emulate the behavior of models with whom they share certain similarities, such as age.

Generalizations based on the data that do exist are time bound, impressionistic, and/or restricted to the particular facets of elderly life that researchers have chosen to examine.

One of the researchers, (Brown, 2007) examined several characteristics of elderly characters on prime-time TV in an analysis of aggregated data and found that older adults were consistently underrepresented relative to their real-world counterparts: Whereas the 10-to-19-year-old age group constituted roughly 15% of the U.S. population, this cohort of TV characters accounted for about 80% of the prime-time population. The male-female ratio in ...