Predictors of attitudes to age across Europe

DWP Research Report 735 by Dominic Abrams, Christin-Melanie Vauclair and Hannah Swift (Centre for the Study of Group Processes, Department of Psychology, University of Kent)

This research examines the interaction of differences between individuals and differences between countries in the European region (28 countries) on people’s attitudes toward old age (i.e. beyond the age of 70), and on their experiences of ageism.

The research explores how people’s age and other demographics combine with different characteristics of the countries in which they dwell to affect responses to 13 measures that include some of the following:

• age categorisation and identification;
• perceived status of people over 70;
• perceived threat from people over 70;
• perceptions of stereotypes of people aged over 70;
• how positively or negatively people feel towards those aged over 70 (direct prejudice); and
• people’s experiences of ageist prejudice against themselves.

Understanding both the individual and the structural (‘country-level’) factors that influence these measures can help us to predict and understand where problems of ageism or age misperception are most likely to arise.

Key Findings:

• Regardless of their own age, respondents in countries with a higher proportion of older people were more positive, suggesting that societal attitudes shift as a population ages. Older people’s status was perceived to be higher in countries that had later state pension ages.
• Age discrimination was personally experienced by about one third of all respondents, with the UK placed just below the average for all ESS countries. Across all ESS countries just under half of the respondents, including those from the UK, regarded age discrimination to be a serious or very serious issue.
• Age discrimination was affected by a variety of individual characteristics: with ageism being experienced more by younger people, those who were less well educated, felt poorer, were not in paid employment or were living in urban areas.
• Across all ESS countries the stereotypes of older people as friendly and competent were consistently affected by age, education and residential area, with the UK placed above average for friendliness and below average for competence for all ESS countries. The gap between these two stereotypes is therefore notably larger in the UK. At the country-level, countries with higher unemployment rates and a lower proportion of people aged over 65, stereotyped older people as less competent.
• At the country-level older people being seen as a threat to the economy was influenced by economy-related characteristics, whereas, older people being seen as a threat to health services was affected by state pension age for men, i.e. a policy-related variable.

The full report (PDF 92pp) was published in May 2011

ISBN: 978 1 84712 961 1


Hazel’s comment:

Because I'd left this in my drafts file for quite a while I had to go back to check the availability of the PDF and so on and found a blog post from 50-Plus Marketing which included the following quotes from Dick Stroud.

The UK’s Department for Works and Pensions has published a report that tells us surprising little.

I thought it was strange the DWP should be involved in this sort of research until I saw how the guy responsible for pensions was spinning the research – “The idea that 59 is old belongs in the past. We need to challenge our perceptions of what old age actually means.” I suspect this is code for “we might have another bash at raising the pension age”.

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