PSYC 336 Week 1 Blog Entry 1 Example

Blog Entry 1 and Comment

PSYC 336 Gerontology, Blog Entry 1 (entry and one comment)

Thread by [Student Name]

The encounter, the people in it and the classmate's blog are composites standing in for the student's own; the textbook and published studies are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for PSYC 336.

Blog Entry

On Saturday, I stood in line at the grocery store behind a man who looked to be in his eighties. He asked the clerk whether a coupon for cereal applied to the larger box. The clerk, who seemed friendly, leaned toward him and answered very slowly and loudly, "THIS COUPON, HONEY, IS FOR THE SMALL ONE." The man nodded, said he understood, and paid. As he left, he glanced back at me and rolled his eyes. He had not asked anything confusing, and he had heard her perfectly well the first time. Two people behind me laughed, which seemed to make it worse.

Researchers call this kind of talk elderspeak: speech that sounds the way adults talk to young children, slower, louder and simpler, often with words like "honey." The clerk was not trying to be unkind. That is exactly what makes it a useful example of ageism, the stereotyping of people because of their age. Quadagno (2018) describes how age stereotypes are built into everyday expectations, so that people act on them without noticing. The clerk assumed, because of his age, that he could not hear or understand, and she adjusted her speech before he gave her any reason to.

It would be easy to dismiss the moment as harmless, but research suggests otherwise. When Chang et al. (2020) gathered more than four hundred studies from around the world, spanning a quarter century and many kinds of health outcomes, they found the same message almost everywhere. In all but a handful of those studies, older people exposed to ageism fared worse in body or mind, and the proportion of studies finding harm rose over the years the review covered. The review included both structural ageism, such as unequal access to care, and individual ageism, such as older people absorbing negative stereotypes about themselves. Small, repeated encounters like the one I saw are part of how those stereotypes are communicated.

The scene also made me examine myself. I realized I do something similar when I speak to my grandmother on the phone: I raise my voice before she has asked me to. From now on, I want to wait and adjust only if she needs it. She has never once told me she cannot hear me, and I suspect the habit says more about my assumptions than her hearing.

Readers: have you noticed elderspeak, or done it yourself without meaning to?

Comment on Danielle's Blog

Danielle, your story about your grandmother learning to video-call her great-grandchildren on her first smartphone was a great counterexample to the stereotype that older adults cannot learn new technology. It took her longer to learn the steps, but once she did, she used the phone every day. That fits the textbook's point that many age-related differences are smaller and more individual than stereotypes suggest (Quadagno, 2018). It also connects to my blog: if the salesperson had assumed she could not learn and refused to teach her, she might never have tried. Expectations shape what older adults are given the chance to do. Your grandmother also seems to have been motivated by something she cared about, seeing the children, which the textbook would say matters more than age for learning. Did she find it easier to learn from family than from the store?

References

Chang, E.-S., Kannoth, S., Levy, S., Wang, S.-Y., Lee, J. E., & Levy, B. R. (2020). Global reach of ageism on older persons' health: A systematic review. PLOS ONE, 15(1), Article e0220857. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220857

Quadagno, J. (2018). Aging and the life course: An introduction to social gerontology (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.