STUDENTS’ STEREOTYPES ON AGEING AND THE USE OF ELDERLY PEOPLE IN ADVERTISING
STUDENTS’ STEREOTYPES ON AGEING AND THE USE OF ELDERLY PEOPLE IN ADVERTISING1

Summary/Abstract: “It is well known that elderly people represent one of the most stereotyped social groups considering the criteria of age. Not only young population but also even the elderly people have negative cognitions regarding their peers and ageing. In this article, we preset the results of a pilot research on students’ stereotypes and their attitudes regarding the appearance of the elderly people in a commercial for promoting a product. As the young people who took part in this research (students form communication and advertising faculty) were not familiar with age friendly values, our first purpose of the research was to investigate how the students portray the elderly people. Therefore, a content analysis has been done upon the students’ responses (N=59) to a class activity task. The research data showed that most of the students assigned positive features to the elderly people such as happy and healthy. Otherwise, the content analysis of the commercial scripts indicated that they would cast seniors to a stereotyped role rather than to an active one on the job market or in the business and showed them happy only in connection with the product usage”.

• Details
• Contents