Intergenerational talk and communication with older people.

INT'L. J. AGING AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, Vol. 34(4) 271-297,1992

INTERGENERATIONAL TALK AND COMMUNICATION WITH OLDER PEOPLE

HOWARD GILES University of California, Santa Barbara NIKOLAS COUPLAND JUSTINE COUPLAND University of Wales College of Cardiff ANGIE WILLIAMS University of California, Santa Barbara JON NUSSBAUM University of Oklahoma

ABSTRACT

A program of research conducted within an anti-agism paradigm demonstrates that young people process and respond to the speech of older people in stereotypical ways. Such conclusions result from studies using a variety of research methods. Experimental studies demonstrate that older-sounding speech triggers age schematic responses and that young people tend to use agist strategies of information seeking and compliance gaining from older people, while interactive studies explore how stereotypes and age identities are co-produced by young and old people in conversation. We use lifespan and intercultural perspectives to argue that the communicative patterns we observe in our studies are in some senses and contexts counterproductive in both the long and short term, in that they can reproduce negative attitudes toward aging as well as inhibit successful aging.

This article overviews an evolving program of interdisciplinary, multi-method research concerned with intergenerationalcommunication. The studies described here dovetail both subjectivist and objectivist methodologies, with the underlying goal of understanding the relationships between communicative processes and 271 0 1992, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.

doi: 10.2190/TCMU-0U65-XTEH-B950 http://baywood.com

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aging. Here we draw the results together by adopting lifespan [l]and intercultural communication [2] perspectives to explore how our studies may illuminate some aspects of the process of developmental adaptation (to life events and life changes). Successful adaptation is equated with successful aging, and the role of communication in facilitating or impeding these goals is explored. In particular, we describe communication patterns that may perpetuate negative rather than positive adaptation cycles across the lifespan. We believe that the essence of successful aging is the ability of individuals to adapt effectively to the numerous and often unpredictable changes which occur throughout the entirety of life. To “come to grips” with the aging process therefore necessitates an understanding of how individuals constantly adapt to life events. Communication scholars, unlike theorists in the sister disciplines of psychology and sociology, conceptualize adaptation as a relational process which places an emphasis upon the interaction between individuals. The process of adaptation across the lifespan can best be observed within the ongoing relationships of interacting individuals. Relationships and the relational networks within which individuals find themselves develop throughout the lifespan, and these relational changes can function to aid individuals as they cope with their everyday existence. Within each of these family, friend, romantic, or professional relationships, as well as with interactions with acquaintances and strangers, we as individuals discover not only who we are, but also find the strength and resources to manage our lives. Put quite simply, individuals do not adapt to the aging process in social isolation, but through and within their interactions with others. The majority of these interactions are embedded within a well-defined relational context. Often it is an obligation of the relationship to aid the interactive partner who needs help: for instance, a mother who teaches her child to read, or an adult child who cares for an elderly parent. In other relationships, most notably friendships, the voluntary and equal nature of the relationship provides mutual help, both with emotional support and with substantive needs. As these various relationships change throughout the lifespan, the ability of each relationship to aid in the adaptation process changes. This ability for a relationship to act as an adaptive “buffer,” and the definitional changes that occur within the relationship, can be observed within the interaction as it transpires between relational partners. A lifespan communication approach posits that not only are relationships in a constant state of change, but that the adaptive importance of certain relationships also changes throughout our lives. This very fact makes it essential to study the interactive dynamics of relationships carefully, as they transpire within the context of the particular stage of life. Working in an intercultural context, Kim models adaptation as involving a dynamic and cyclical stress-adaption-growth process-as an individual adapts, s h e encounters various stresses which, when overcome, lead to adaptation and personal growth [2]. This can easily be reconceptualized as a lifespan dynamic;

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life events or life stages may be seen (though of course, not inevitably) as stresses, and the adaptation-growth pattern as a lifespan developmental process. Life events can and often do cause stress, and this includes both positive as well as negative events. For example, we adapt to first grade, adolescence, adulthood and middle age; to marriage and having children; to losing a spouse through death or divorce, and so on [3]. Such life transitions often bring stresses and strains, and some leave emotional scars, but in particular, most pose developmental challenges to individuals and their social networks. Essentially, we can visualize the challenges of development across the lifespan as a continuous process of adaptation [4, 51. Just as Kim places communication at the center of her framework of successful adaptation, we propose that lifespan communication processes may be crucial for successful aging [6]. Successful aging, like successful adaptation, may depend upon a number of individual factors such as self acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth [7]. Given this, we can see how images of aging and growing old (shared by many young and old alike) which are ubiquitous in intra-, intergenerational, media and/or public communication can influence life adaptation, development, and successful aging. One of the strengths of Kim’s model that we would draw upon is her global view of various communication networks and the ways in which they facilitate adaptation [2]. This orientation illustrates that positive prospects for lifespan adaptation may involve the need to address communication issues at intra- and intergenerationalas well as media and public communication levels. Kim argues that most immigrants adapt successfully to their host environments, and that such changes occur as people engage in social interactions [2]. However, we would be cautious about suggesting that older people need to adapt to “young culture”; rather, we see adaptation in the aging context as adaptation to life events and life changes. We see the utility of Kim’s model being applied to the aging context through the focal role she affords system based communicativeprocesses in adaptation. That said, we would not wish to embrace all theoretical or ideological aspects of Kim’s approach. On the positive side, communication may facilitate adaptation. However, patterns and styles of communication (at every level) may be equally instrumental in the perpetuation of relatively unsuccessful negative adaptation cycles. This is especially likely when negative stereotyping prevails as part of the sociocultural beliefs about a group, be it an ethnic or age “minority.” In an intergenerational context, this would entail producing and reproducing negative views of older people and expectations of frailty and decline. The worse scenario of this can be characterized as a downward spiraling stress-adaptation-declineprocess. Following Kim’s framework, we can envisage how intrugenerational communication feeds into this cycle, as when older people engage in potentially contagious talk of frailties, inabilities,and agist expectations of ill health. Moreover, illustrative examples of this can be readily drawn from our data. In a similar fashion, younger people may set up expectations for their own

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developmental patterns, and even at relatively early stages of life may plot a negative aging trajectory for themselves [8]. Previous models of ours have afforded a pivotal role to communication in elderly health and social support, factors which we would see as fundamental to lifespan adaptations [9]. We have described the ways in which localized communication accommodation strategies can, among other things, reinforce negative identities or promote cognitive and behavioral change in support contexts [lo]. The quality of social support received across the lifespan may therefore prove to be crucial to developmental adaptation. It is now widely accepted that not all support outcomes are positive. For example, if support recipients feel they cannot reciprocate, then feelings of inequity may undermine both the support relationships as well as the recipient’s self-esteem [ll]. There is also a need for support to avoid encouraging dependence, so that certain negatively tainted interactions can be relatively effective in promoting good health outcomes and successful development [ 121. Evidence suggests that subjective perceptions of support are perhaps more highly related to health outcomes than are quantitative aspects (such as size or inter-connectedness) of network systems themselves. Space precludes a complete discussion of various support issues that are implicated for successful aging, but suffice it to say that support is particularly salient for lifespan development. Indicative of this is the extensive social gerontological literature featuring various aspects of older people’s support needs [e.g., 13, 141. Reflecting, perhaps, an ideology of decrement and dependence [see also, 1.51 it is interesting to note that, at least, in this context older people are perhaps ovzrrepresented as recipients rather than as resources of support. Since adaptive changes occur as people engage in social interactions, supportive communication is conceptualized as the facilitator of successful adaptation. More generally, in a social gerontological context, the sociolinguistic route to ill health and dissatisfaction may stem in part from a lifespan ideology-with all its developmental triggers in terms of social clocks [16], transitions [4], and so on-that rests on biological determinism, and one which underscores decrement [171. Hence, we envisage an interdependent set of relationships between lifespan communication and development, and social support and health [101. Furthermore, it seems to us that “competent” communication, being that which promotes successful aging, would be sensitive to the psychological, social, and health needs of one’s interactional partners. This would manifest itself in a variety of accommodative communication patterns in interpersonal settings across the lifespan. Having laid out this rather broad conceptual framework, we will discuss research that looks chiefly at intergenerational communication and the way perceptions of older people and beliefs about aging set certain priorities for interpreting and producing talk. In intergenerational contexts (as in most others), subjective perceptions involve assumptions and expectations about one’s interactional partner, and there is an inevitable leakage of this into understanding and evaluating what is heard. In seeking to form an impression, and in order to evaluate what


is said, speech style or accent can be utilized as one form of identity marker promoting the categorization and subsequent stereotyping of speakers. A program of study broadly known as language attitude research draws upon this logic to examine a wide range of attitudes toward different speech varieties, from regional dialect differences to ethnic varieties. The first studies to be reported here employ language attitudes methodology to examine attitudes to older people’s speech styles. This method is ideally suited to studying age differences, since particular vocal qualities are readily associated with age [18]. Following this, we describe how individuals of different generations hold different kinds of beliefs about the value of talk. The final section of the article considers intergenerational communication in some detail, focusing on how various images of aging are achieved through interaction, and how attitudes and beliefs about aging and the elderly may be coproduced and enacted by young and old people working together.

AGE CATEGORIZATION AND LANGUAGE AlTITUDES The starting point for our language attitude studies of aging is Lambert’s “matched-guise technique” (MGT), which requires listener-judges to evaluate supposedly different speakers heard on tape reading the same neutral passage of prose [191. These “different” speakers are actually the same bi- or multi-dialectal person who can produce various authentic (as independently assessed in pilot work) versions of the same stimulus material. The most general findings from studies of this kind are that standard accents are upgraded relative to nonstandard accents in terms of status, and on personality trait judgements such as competence and intelligence. As well, in comparison to nonstandard speakers, the perceived quality of standard speakers’ arguments is upgraded; standard speakers are thought to be more suitable for higher status occupations, and they gain more cooperation from others. Therefore, the use of a standard accent confers considerable social advantage. This has been found to be true across the Anglophone world, in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States [see 20, ch. 21. The evaluative differential between standard and nonstandard speech is reversed, however, when the latter is a valued symbol of ethnic, class, or regional identity. Most language attitude research is, however, “agist” to the extent that the listener-judges are usually, and the speakers almost always are young adults. This bias is apparent in mainstream social psychology, sociolinguistics, and communication studies generally, but it could also be theoretically crucial. For instance, two competing hypotheses suggest themselves with respect to age and accentedness. On the one hand, it is possible that the usual evaluative profile is largely irrelevant when older speakers are involved, given the pervasive negative stereotypes associated with the competence of older people. On the other hand, it could be that processing a standard accent (and also a fast speech rate, given that slower rates are also associated with lack of competence and old age) could

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assume even more importance in older years, as it could stave off some of the negative stereotyped connotations of being old. We conducted two studies to consider the relative merits of these positions. The earlier of these comprised a factorial (3 x 2 x 2) independent samples design (fast, medium, slow rate; standard, non-standard accent; older, young guise) [21]. The speaker produced twelve versions of the same 320-word passage in which he was heard talking about his car, supposedly during an interview. In this study and the follow-up study, the speaker was a male actor (aged mid-30s) whose professional viability depended on his ability to produce different authentic age- and classrelated guises-an accomplishment he achieved many times on national television. Twelve groups of young adult listener-judges then rated one or another of these twelve target speakers on traits derived from relevant literatures. Manipulation checks substantiated that the actor’s guises were perceived as intended, and when “elderly,” he was, on average, reckoned to be sixty-two years old. Predictably, the guises using standard accents were upgraded on status and downgraded on benevolence and integrity. The “older” guises were considered more “aged” (involving judgements along the dimensions “frail” and “old fashioned”) and more “vulnerable” (i.e., “weak” and “insecure”), with the most vulnerable voice being the slow, non-standard,older voice. The fast-talking,standard older speaker was perceived more favorably, but this perception was tempered with the finding that, although the use of a fast, standard accent reduced perceived vulnerability, the speaker was nonetheless seen as asocial and egocentric. Moreover, the fasttalking older speaker was rated as the most unbenevolent of his age group. Unlike most other studies in this research domain, open-ended qualitative information was also gathered by asking participants to give reasons for their particular ratings of the speaker(s), as well as asking them to explain why the speaker had made certain statements. This provided some interesting findings. The combination of old age and non-standard speech produced responses that drew heavily on assumptions about both old age and relative disadvantage. We found that judges interpreted extracts from the text, such as the speaker saying “I didn’t know what to think,” in different ways depending on the speaker’s age. This particular statement was more likely to be attributed to his being “confused” if older (and recall he was perceived as only in his early 6Os!);but if he was young, it was much more likely to be attributed to his wishing to withhold judgment given the complexity of the issues at hand. In other words, listeners were interpreting the same utterances in schema-consistent fashion, and in an agist manner. When asked to overview their ratings, despite the fact that the speaker said exactly the same thing in each condition, the judges described him as “arrogant and pompous” when a young standard speaker; “trying to impress” or “using the words of others” when nonstandard and young; “egocentric, living in the past, and talking of trivia” when standard and older; and even “stupid, and loosing his grip” when nonstandard and older. Even more interestingly, when invited to substantiate these judgements by pinpointing textual information, respondents would very often highlight

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exactly the same speakers’ utterances to justify their very disparate claims! The open-ended data clearly indicated that respondents were using heuristics to interpret what they had heard, and that they tailored information to fit schemas prompted by age and class variables. A follow-up study employed the same independent variables, but the content of the passage was different [22].Again, the speaker was talking about his car, but this time his competence was called into question since he was purportedly being interviewed about a car accident (no personal injury involved), the responsibility for which was uncertain. An interesting finding vis-a-vis our hypotheses was an age by accent interaction effect. A clear judgmental hierarchy with significant differences among all conditions emerged as follows for perceived competence: standard elderly > standard young > nonstandard young > nonstandard elderly. In addition, the cognitive mediation processes of listener-judges were also under study in an attempt to acknowledge their role as active inference-makers. Subjects were given a cognitive responding questionnaireasking them, among other things, to list the thoughts and feelings they had when the speaker was talking. Other measures included textual interpretation items (e.g., items such as, “Was the speaker aware of damage?”; “Was the speaker to blame?”), and a passage recognition questionnaire which was administered two days later. Results of listenerjudges’ interpretations of the text revealed potent age effects. Younger speakers were perceived to be more aware of the damage caused by the accident than older speakers. Older speakers were denigrated as “doddery,” “vague,” and “rambling”; younger speakers were seen as stronger than older speakers, who either received fewer comments or were seen as more upset and weak. Recognition tasks administered two days later were based on signal detection analysis. These revealed that information spoken by younger stimulus-speakers was more accurately remembered than that spoken by older speakers. Age markers in speech may act as sociolinguistic triggers activating schemas for decoding processes, which in turn lead to labeling and attributional processes which presumably interfere with subsequent recall. In sum, older people’s sociolinguistic behavior is negatively evaluated, actively processed in a stereotypical manner, and memorized less effectively. Returning to our hypotheses, we find that neither was fully supported, although elements of each were. Under these conditions, accent effects appear to be evaluatively consistent across the lifespan for young judges. For an older person, having a fast speech rate and standard accent appears to have some social value in influencing competence-related judgements. These studies indicate that voice cues are enough to influence evaluations and, therefore, even those who are objectively thought to be “competent” communicators may need to break through a veil of subjective assumptions. These findings begin to illustrate how some barriers may be erected communicatively, imposing restraints on interpersonal or intergroup understanding, and potentially inhibiting successful aging. Subjective appraisals of speakers may be related more

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to their perceived social group membership than their communication competence [23]. Therefore, beliefs and assumptions about older peoples’ communication patterns and preferences are almost certainly instrumental in influencing what is attended to, encoded, and responded to in interactions with older people. If we were to characterize young culture as the dominant, high-vitality culture in Western society (similar to Kim’s “host” culture), we could begin to understand how the results of our studies of language attitudes toward age align with those that study attitudes toward ethnic varieties. Namely, dominant, high-vitality cultures hold stereotypical, usually negative, views (particularly on valued dimensions) of “minorities” [20]. Thus, regardless of what older people say, young people will interpret talk identified as “older” as showing signs of decrement-the expected norm of the subordinate minority culture. If stereotypical inferences are drawnfrorn the speech of older people, and young subjects are using schema-driven processing as demonstrated above, then talk to older speakers may also be mediated by beliefs about the ways in which they communicate. Thus, it stands to reason that older people would also use schemadriven strategies when seeking information from others. Beliefs About Elder Communication

Carver and de la Garza had two groups of students in Florida read the same brief five-line description of an automobile accident involving either an “old” (84 years) or a “young” (22 years) male driver; the impetus as it happened for the messages in our previous MGT studies [24]. Participants were presented with a list of nine empirically-derived questions that could be posed to the protagonist. These questions were to be rank-ordered in terms of their perceived importance in assigning responsibility for the accident. As predicted, age labels induced stereotypic information seeking. Specifically, the “elderly” label led to differential patterns of information seeking concerning the physical, mental, and sensory inadequacies of the driver; the “young” label led to questions concerning speeding and alcohol consumption. We conducted two further studies using young judges in their twenties. The first extended the design to include seventy-seven, sixty-six, and fifty-four-year-olds, as well as eighty-four and twenty-two-year-old targets [25]. As the age of the target increased, the importance of questions about health, physical condition, quickness of reaction, and mental competence also increased in a linear fashion. The reverse occurred for questions concerning alcohol consumption; these questions were asked more frequently of young targets and tailed off linearly as the target’s age increased. In a follow-up study conducted in New Zealand with Sik Ng and Janet Moody, we extended the target ages further to cover the lifespan from sixteen to ninety-one years (i.e., in ten-year age bands) [26]. Again, health and competence information was more frequently sought from older speakers, while speeding and alcohol information was perceived as more relevant for


younger targets. However, rather than a steady linear trend as in the previous study, the importance of health and competence information seeking was observed to increase most sharply at thirty-one and eighty-one years. As in the previous study, information seeking based on speeding and alcohol showed a negative linear trend. In this case, therefore, not only was information seeking agist, but information seeking which seems to rely on a decrement perception of growing older is well-grounded for middle-age targets, and increases drastically with a target of around thirty-one years of age. That young (and older) adults have beliefs that allow them to formulate what to say to each other is amply demonstrated by our experimental examination of how younger people might address older people when requesting different kinds of assistance, tapping into the rapidly developing program of research into compliance gaining [27]. Working from the premise that older adults are stereotyped as less effective communicatorsthan their younger counterparts, we attempted to tease apart two potentially stereotypical views of older communication [ B ]One . view proposes that older people are labelled as “weak and feeble,” and thus their influence strategies would tend to be characterized as gentle and polite, while the opposing view of “egocentric” and “abrasive” older people suggests stronger, more directly assertive strategies. The study examined these two views while manipulating the legitimacy of the request made [29]. Respondents completed a questionnaire designed to investigate how people set about persuading someone else to do something for them. They were asked to imagine themselves as either a “typical twenty-year-old” or “a typical seventyyear-old,” and to ask a particular favor of either a twenty-year-old or a seventyyear-old. In addition, participants were told that they should either feel justified (legitimate request) or unjustified (illegitimate request) in asking the favor, since they either had or had not granted a similar favor about a week ago. Respondents were first asked to write down what they would say, and then to check off from a list which strategies they thought they might use. Their responses were categorized in terms of “pressure to comply,” “directness,” “positivity,” and “logic.” “Pressure to comply” was assessed by totalling the number of strategies produced by participants. “Directness” referred to the extent to which the request was made clearly and explicitly. “Positivity” was the degree to which positive outcomes of compliance and negative outcomes of non-compliance were specified. Finally, “logic” reflected the degree to which the participants used evidence and reason in their compliance gaining attempts. Although the results did not succinctly confirm either stereotype, young respondents believed that older actors in general were willing to exert more pressure than their younger counterparts. They construed older people to be more “direct”with young targets than with their peers, and to be more forceful and aggressive in their compliance gaining attempts. This could reflect construals of older persons as authority figures who may use age status alone as justification for exerting pressure to comply. On the other hand, younger people were prepared to be more

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“direct” and more likely to use “positive” strategies when the request was less legitimate and the target was older than their own age group. Several interpretations were forwarded, including the possibility that younger actors may be inclined to use more direct messages because of beliefs about older people’s cognitive incompetence. It was also proposed that interactants might perceive such intergroup communication to be prone to incorrect inferences, requiring them to make their requests more explicit. Also, actors were feast “positive” when the target was older and the request was legitimate, thus legitimacy provides an important qualifier here. The use of “cajoling” (i.e., highly “positive”) strategies by young persuaders when the request was less legitimate and the target was elderly implies that the young respondents in this study used positive inducements when other persuasive avenues seemed closed. The respondents in this study were hypothesizing about strategies that might be used, and in this way the study gave access to young people’s perceptions of older persons’ strategies. Obviously, these kinds of studies need to be replicated in an interactional context from both generations’ perspectives (as do the above MGT studies) before any hard and fast conclusions can be extracted. Nevertheless, the fact that age (besides legitimacy) has an effect on the type of strategy believed to be used indicates some profitable directions for future research in this area, and underscores the potential role of stereotypes mediating fact-to-face communication. The remaining study in this section demonstrates the ways in which different generation groups construe each others’ beliefs about talk [30]. A British sample of young (average age 19) and older persons (average age 70) completed a version of a “beliefs about talk” (BaT) questionnaire, modified to include items aimed at assessing one’s own age peers as well as eliciting attributions about other age cohorts’ beliefs about talk. Results of a factor analysis of the questionnaire study suggest that older people construed talk more positively than did their younger counterparts. In addition, young people rated their peers as likely to use talk for affiliative reasons. Older people considered their peers as having more communication problems than themselves individually. Thus, both young and old individualsdowngraded their own age peers’ BaTs relative to their own individual profiles, and presented more positivepersonal BaT profiles than when rating other members of their particular social group. That young people may have a negative view of older peoples’ BaTs is indicated by their perception of older persons as assertive and valuing small talk, without these factors being apparent in the young people’s views of their own age peers. There was a recreational element of talk common to older people’s ratings of both themselves and their peers; in contrast, they viewed young people as skeptical about the value of talk, but in favor of “chit-chat.” Since each group construes the other (but not itself) as valuing “small talk” and “chit-chat,’’ there seems considerable potential for intergenerational miscommunication with both young and old engaging in over-accommodative small talk together.


In sum, young people believe they will seek information from, and gain the compliance of, older folk in ways that differ from how they would approach individuals of their own age group. Moreover, the assumptions underlying these different anticipated strategies seem to be based on and applied to uncomplimentary beliefs about the ways in which older folk communicate and talk. This negative flavor of beliefs about aging and older speakers may effectively frustrate many older people’s positive adaptive attempts, creating and reinforcing communication barriers to successful aging. Negative interpretations of elderly speech, as demonstrated by language attitude studies, and negatively framed speech to elderly people are the communicative material of negative lifespan adaptation, especially when applied across diverse contexts. Moreover, although the studies reported here all involve respondents who are strangers to each other, interactions within close relationships can also be framed in such terms despite good intentions. Since family and friendship communication is thought to be particularly important for successful aging, this should perhaps be a matter of considerable concern both for research and in applied settings. In general, these studies illustrate that language is tailored not to the objective or even subjective needs of listeners (although in some circumstances it can be), but to subjective perceptions of listener characteristics. The last two studies indicate that our young respondents appeared to view older speakers are relatively under-accommodative (i.e., assertive), and this meshes with findings from our interactive database introduced below. INTERGENERATIONALTALK The way older people talk and are spoken to by younger people is, of course, a central research focus, although this is an issue which has received very little empirical attention across the disciplines, especially as it relates to noninstitutionalized older people [see 201. That said, data are available (mainly in caring and nursing contexts) which suggest that many young people “over-accommodate” to older people, irrespectiveof their individual functional autonomy [31]. This finding might be mediated by stereotypes of either the older person’s incompetence or sensory decrement, and could also be encoded as a means of establishing social control, especially in the context of caregiving. Needless to say, it is not solely the prerogative of older people to be depersonalized linguistically; visually impaired and handicapped people can be spoken to in similar registers, as can the hospitalized young in some instances. Nonetheless, over-accommodation to older people can occur even when avoidance of such tactics has been vigorously and normatively prescribed-for example, in the training regimens of home care assistants [32]. In addition, one study of nurses’ interactions with elderly residents in long-stay hospital care shows how younger people can deflect and play down some of the seriously expressed concerns, thoughts, and feelings of older people [33]-an instance of under-accommodation to their apparent needs

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and rights. All of the above can of course cause older people irritation, anger, and frustration, and perhaps especially so when the over- or under-accommodative acts are delivered in one’s second language in bi-/multilingual communities and societies [Jehannes Ytsma, personal communication].Despite the often nurturing intentions of young people, over- and under-accommodation can impair communication, especially among cognitively alert and socially active older people [34]. These were the kinds of persons constituting the older, non-institutionalized sample in our own study. Our corpus was a set of forty videotaped interactions where pairs of volunteer subjects aged seventy to eight-seven and thirty to forty years were asked to “get to know one another.” Participants were given no further instructions and were left alone, knowing they were being video-recorded for eight minutes. The older women, most with (grossly characterized) upper-working-class backgrounds, were members of two Day Centers; most lived alone and were widowed. The young women were mostly lower-middle-class and married, and were recruited through an advertisement in a local newspaper. Twenty of the dyads were intergenerational (young-old), ten were peer young, and ten peer elderly. Following a Latin-Square design, each subject participated in two interactions, one within and one across generations. Our initial quest was to determine whether the younger women “over-accommodated” their older partners and to document such strategies verbally and nonverbally. There was evidence of non-verbal over-accommodation (e.g., initial and profuse nodding of the head placed at a tilt by the young) even from our young sample who seemed positively disposed towards, and had experience of conversing with, older people. Most analytic attention, however, was directed at quite another sociolinguistic phenomenon, which we labeled “painful” self-disclosure (PSD). In this admittedly limited data set, we found that older people spent about one-sixth of their time in initial intergenerational encounters disclosing personal and seemingly painful information about themselves (e.g., their accidents, family bereavements, ongoing medical problems), whereas the young spent a negligible time (less than 2%) doing this. When the latter did, it was invariably a reciprocal act. More specifically, we found that of our twenty intergenerational dyads, sixteen contained instances of older PSD with one young person reciprocating. Of our ten peer older dyads, there were nine instances of reciprocated PSD, whereas in the ten peer young dyads, we found only four instances, three of which were non-reciprocated. Whether these PSDs were subjectively painful to the older people in the actual retelling is, of course, a moot point, yet the fact that these events were objectively “painful” at some point for the disclosers is incontestable. However, we were not so much interested in the content and quantity of these revelations-the dominant emphasis in the literature on self-disclosure [35]-as much as in the process of self-disclosure. In other words, our focus was on the ways in which PSDs were interactively managed, how they were introduced into discourse, responded to, and curtailed.


We identified four phases of disclosive sequences: pre-contexts, disclosive modes, next-moves, and closings (for details of this taxonomy, see [36]). Precontexts to the emergence of a PSD in discourse can be analyzed along a continuum. One pole of the continuum is represented by “direct elicitation,” where there are strong obligations to disclose and few options about so doing. Disclosures could thereafter be “recipient-determined” through elicitation (e.g., “is your husband alive?”, “do you sleep all right when you get to bed?”). In fact, the young play a more consistent role in eliciting PSD in intergenerational interactions than they do in peer interactions. Young people asked 82 percent of the questions in intergenerationalencounters, and were characterized by independent observers as “interviewing” [37]. At the other end of the continuum, there are weak obligations to disclose, and PSD can be “discloser-determined.”Discloserdetermined PSDs constituted 53 percent of total PSDs. Thus, the older women themselves played a substantial role in initiating disclosive behavior. Various subtypes of discloser-determined PSDs emerged, some prefaced by previous disclosure of age, or indeed a previous PSD; while some PSD’s are produced “out of the blue” in talk that follows a silence. Recipients’ next moves can either encourage or discourage further PSD; they range from minimal acknowledgmentsto “full” moves which may elaborate PSD and encourage further disclosure. Although older people’s PSDs are textually managed quite well by some young interlocutors, at least in procedural terms, and sometimes even solicited by them in the first place (as in the case of recipient determined varieties above), many young people appear to find themselves in an “accommodative dilemma” when almost every possible follow-up move is a dispreferable one. For instance, they can switch topics and discourage further disclosure, but this represents an aggressive or dismissive stance. They can express empathy, which risks being seen as over-accommodative, or they can ,signal interest and involvement, yet this can lead to an escalation of maintenance of disclosive talk. Often what does happen is minimal “mmm” or expressions of surprise (“good heavens”) or sympathy (“oh dear”), which appear to all concerned as communicativelybland (in this context anyway). It is entirely plausible that this unnerving experience will in some instances deter younger people from engaging in future intergenerationalcontact [38]. Finally, there is a rich variety of ways in which PSDs can be creatively terminated, either by the discloser herself or by the recipient. We can distinguish moves which refer back to the painful information disclosed and seek to modify it by changing perspective, and moves which, on the other hand, develop conversation away from painful topics-shifting or switching topic. In the case of discloser-managed topic shifts, a previous disclosure is, by definition, closed. There are also various categories of discloser moves (some of them also used by recipients) including inversion, contextualization, face compensation, and minimization, which function to “lighten” a disclosure. Inversion strategies, for example, reinterpret disclosed information in a more positive light, look on the

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bright side, or make light of a trouble [39]. One elderly interactant spoke of her loneliness caused by moving, and then closed the sequence by describing more positive aspects of her new home; in another instance, a recipient closed a sequence by responding to her partner’s disclosure that since her husband’s death she has lived alone in a non-native country with: “Ah well, still I mean it’s nice that you’re settled here.” A more general strategy used by recipients to change perspective may be to locate a painful state in its wider context. Offering solutions may also effect a close, as in one interactant’s response to an elderly person’s disclosure about her son’s marriage breakup: “Perhaps they’ll get back together.” Disclosers may compensate for the face-threatening PSDs they have made by counterbalancing them with self-reports which build positive face. The two final perspectivechanging strategies used by disclosers are moves which boundary-off disclosures without necessarily alleviating their projected painfulness. For example, a discloser may rationalize her painful circumstances, as when an elderly person explains why her grandchildren don’t visit her by suggesting,“They are busy with their jobs I suppose.” Finally, expressions of resignation achieve a form of closure, such as, “Oh well, what else can we expzct?” Often, however, PSD termination occurs with an abrupt topic switch, as in the case where one older woman introduced the fact that one of her children had died years ago, and was met with her peer’s unrelated response: “If you pass my bag I could comb my hair.” Of course, there is interindividual variability both in the ways in which older people manage their PSDs, and in the ways p u n g people react to and discuss them. As an addendum to the intergenerational PSD analysis, we conduced a follow-up evaluation study wherein a representative group of young people was shown sixteen diverse audio-extracts (each of approximately half a minute) chosen from the intergenerational encounters in the videotaped study [40]. Nine of these were from PSD sequences, and seven were randomly chosen from nonpainful sequences of elderly disclosure, including some positive reports and some expressions of non-painful (in the defined sense) dissatisfaction about current events or circumstances. The listeners were asked to imagine themselves in the role of the young women they heard on tape, and to describe how they felt, what influenced them most, and what they found problematical. A few young people denied that PSD was at all a problem for them, with one informant even labeling it “lovely”; but most found it “sad” and some even characterized it as a strategy for gaining sympathy or for “having a good moan.” Moreover, it appeared from the data that young people may consider PSD as typical of intergenerational talk, and downplay its problematicality from that perspective. For instance, another informant claimed, “they play for sympathy; some some elderly are very much like young children-they want to be the center of attention for as long as possible” (note the intergroup pronoun). Yet young people tend generally to evaluate PSD in ways that we would interpret as being “undera~~~modative,” and


attribute it negatively as elderly people’s egocentrism, social insensitivity, and the like. PSD in our data context flies in the face of three out of the nine rules for self-disclosure in initial encounters with unfamiliar others proposed by Berger and Bradac [41], namely, never disclose intimate and/or negative information to new acquaintances, and never disclose excessively. Interestingly, the literature from which these rules have been culled is arguably “agist.” Nonetheless, the attributions all too often reflect a decremental model of older communication and talk, indicating that young people may tend to cast themselves in a therapeutic role, allowing and even facilitating elderly ventilation as some kind of catharsis for the assumed hazards of old age [40]. Whether or not older people themselves view intergenerational talk in this way is an empirical question; they may well see themselves as responding to the needs and expectations of young interactional partners. We, however, believe there is much functional significance in this older lack of accommodation as it translates into their garnering social control of the conversation and thereby assists in reducing or avoiding potentially negative intergenerational comparisons; elicits outwardly sympathetic, supportive, and flattering responses from the young as we have just seen; can be a form of self-handicapping [42]; and is often a rational, poignant reflection of their life circumstances and the often painful events they have endured. Painful disclosures are often linked in several ways with age disclosures, which are frequently used to provide a perspective on other aspects of self-disclosure.

DisclosingAge Disclosure of age in years is a particularly interesting phenomenon, not only in its distribution but also in terms of its production and the underlying reasons for its introduction [43]. Disclosure of chronological age (DCA), in our study, occurred most often in the older speakers’ contributions to the intergenerationalconversations (15 in 20 interactions). Virtually every older person in the sample (and in other databases too) disclosed her age in some form or other. Telling age in years is one of a set of discursive “age-categorization”processes which also includes direct and indirect references to the older person’s group membership, role, time of life, frailty, and so on [44]. The most explicit means of self-identifying as elderly is to report age in chronological years. Many of these instances in our data corpus appear as expressed attributions for ill-health (e.g., “I’m not very well these days too. I’m seventy last October”). More indirect references are used when older people refer to themselves in age-related categories or roles, such as “old,” “elderly,” “pensioner,” and “geriatric.” Examples drawn from the data include: “I think us pensioners are very lucky really”; “I’m a great-grandmother now for two”; and sometimes an elderly life position is invoked, as in, “you’ve got to make the best of it especially at our age.”

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Finally, within this category, age-identity is expressed in relation to health, decrement, and death. In our data, elderly speakers very frequently comment on aspects of their own perceived decline, infirmity, or dependency. One older woman reports that she “cannot concentrate to buy” presents for her grandchildren, and another attributes her momentary loss of attention to her age, “What was I going to say? Oh, God now it shows my age.” Even those who do not explicitly refer to their own ill-health, frailty, or incapacity often orient to a decremental life trajectory. For example, “It’s not so frightening going into a home [i.e., a residential home for the elderly] because they don’t even know they’re there themselves so when our time comes we know we’re going to be like that.” Another older woman anticipates her own increasing dependency, and implicitly her own death: “I’m only hoping I can carry on because there’s nothing like your own home-I pray I’ll keep my faculties until I go.” Even denial of infirmity, in the form of disclaimers and supposedly non-alignment with stereotypical expectations, often implicates an aging identity which defies expectations. For example, “Well I’m always busy you know, they talk about old age and ‘you’re lonely,’ well believe me I’m never lonely and I’m never bored and I’m always busy doing something.” Even here, the age category is “in the air.” Our second general category of age identification is “temporal framing processes.” This includes adding time perspective to current issues [45], and recognition of cultural and/or historical change. The strategy of time-shifting into the past from a focus on the present or recent past indicates an elderly identity for the speaker, and locates the speaker with respect to the lifespan. Examples of this strategy are: “I’m a widow now nearly seventeen years”; “I wanted to see where he was buried and all after how many years, thirty odd years”; and “I retired in 1974. I’d been nursing for forty-six years.” Regardless of time-shifting strategies, talk about the distant past can function independently as an identity marker in that it indicates a speaker’s self-association with the past. In this way, a culturalhistorical divide between an elderly individual and her young conversational partner can be established: “ . . . it’s years since I’ve been up this part of the city. . . .years ago I used to come here scrubbing floors.” In some cases, these references mark the older person’s estrangement from contemporary life; in others, the younger person’s estrangement from past times is marked, as when one elderly interactant says, “you wouldn’t know. . . I don’t know if you ever heard of it. . . . it was R. D. Jones’ the Carlton. . . . when I left school at sixteen I went straight there.” A final temporal framing set recognizes historical/cultural/social change. For example, one young woman remarks on patterns of language shift in Wales: “Your generation were speaking Welsh, weren’t they?” Of course, the above categories overlap in ongoing discourse. They do, however, show that the telling of age in years is only one of many strategies by which older people can add age-salience to their talk and interpret experiences and relationships through a filter of age identification. As regards the telling of age


itself, it is striking how age in years tends to be intimately related to other themes of discourse, particularly issues of health and decrement. Two distinctive motivational patterns are suggested by the data. First, age disclosure may be offered as an act of accounting, in order to mitigate the negative associations of actual frailty by appealing to decremental aging as an extenuating circumstance. For example, “I’m seventy. . . . this October, so I find I can’t do it so good.” Secondly, dkjuncrive usage allows the discloser to claim credit against normative expectations of decline; the force of this strategy is “mind I’m gone eighty, I’m going on eighty one! . . . and I think I’m pretty good.” Although these two patterns are quite distinct, they nevertheless appezl to the same underlying model of lifespan development, namely, the normative assumption that increasing decline correlates with increasing chronological age (although maybe not linearly so across the lifespan). Chronological age may be differentiated from contextual age, which represents a person’s subjective experience of hisher life position and is measured in terms of health, economic, social, and mobility dimensions [46]. As we have seen, in some acts of disclosure there is a projected disjunction between chronological and contextual age-a person may see himherself or be seen as doing “better than expected” considering chronological age. The relationship between perceived congruence and incongruence of chronological and contextual age on the one hand, and negative and positive self-evaluations on the other, can be characterized as two orthogonal dimensions. During interaction, DCA may be used to negotiate the relationship between the two dimensions. Given age beliefs in our society, it is more often desirable that contextual age lag behind chronological age. In our data, the discursive accounting pattern of DCA is generally consistent with a subjective profile in which the individual’s decrement is held to be congruent with hisher age. Disjunctive formats always build on a perceived or claimed discrepancy between old age and positive contextual age. Negative self-evaluations combined with incongruent configurations of chronological and contextual age would recognize one’s contextual age to be in advance of one’s chronological age-in this case, the DCA would imply that “I’m bad for my age.” When self-evaluation is positive and contextual and chronological age are congruent, contentment with a predictable pattern of life development is expected. Perhaps the older women disclosed their ages not only to elaborate their identities but also, in the context of our study, because they were placed in a situation which invites intergroup social comparison processes. If the older participants feel at a social disadvantage when subjectively comparing themselves to the younger ones, it is almost certainly because of the assumed disadvantages of their age. Therefore, age may be offered as an identity token being used strategically in discourse in order to orient the self in relation to a social context [43].Notably, the relationship between age and health is one which is frequently established by the older participants themselves during the flow of talk.

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Self-stereotypingand the Sociolinguistic Constructionof Aging

Another process intervenes in the studies reported above, and derives theoretically from Turner’s self-stereotyping theory [47]. When group identity (in this case, elderliness) becomes salient for whatever contextual reasons, people not only depersonalize and stereotype a relevant outgroup, they also stereotype themselves [48]. In other words, they take on characteristics they believe (rightly or wrongly) to be prototypical of the social group to which they themselves belong. Given that age was made salient in our intergenerational encounters, PSDs and telling age may well be facets of older speakers “acting their age.” We could hypothesize (and have observed in naturalisticoccurrences)that when age is made salient (in the contexts of over-accommodating talk being used to those who are older, or when decremental portrayals of old age appear in the media), older people will, compared to a non-age-salient condition, look, move, sound, and talk “older”; a self-stereotypingprocess we have termed “instant aging” [49]. We have documented an instance of a related process occurring in our own interactive data [50]. This case study indicates how the same person can co-construct a radically different persona across two rapidly sequenced interactions. With one partner, an older woman self-presents in a very socially active manner, but with another she exudes a more frail, lonely, and aged performance. Three participants are involved (referred to by fictional names). One peer elderly conversation involves May (aged 79) and Nora (aged 82), and one intergenerational conversation includes May and Jenny (aged 38). In conversation with Nora, May is enabled to portray positive aspects of her life experiences. The discourse steers away from decremental themes, with May focusing on her social activities, coping strategies, and helping roles, often with humor and levity. The flavor of the intergenerational conversation is quite different; May emerges from this as a “victim” of old age, dependent, immobile, and potentially lonely. A discourse analysis of the two contrasting conversations reveals the means by which stereotypic and counterstereotypic age-identitiesmay come to be formulated. May exerts interactional control in her conversation with Nora, introducing and developing themes, taking responsibility for elicitations (e.g., “How are you?”; “So where are you living now?”), and managing topics. In contrast, Nora’s role is much more limited, consisting of up-takes of May’s elicitations and diminishing toward the end of the conversation to minimal responses. In this encounter, May presents a positive approach to the present, and her projected identity is overwhelmingly one of social engagement, although she also acknowledges her dependence: “if they don’t pick me up I don’t go.” It is during these sequences that May receives the most supportive and convergent responses from Nora. Comparison of this conversation with the intergenerational conversation reveals that May achieves her positive presentation as much by avoidance of disclosures as by disclosure itself. In doing so, she seems determined to reject the relatively passive


and dependent identity that Nora’s talk tends to construct. May also projects a light-hearted and humorous approach to her life, which implies a healthy and trouble resistant coping strategy. Nora does not match this humorous tone and, in contrast to May, emerges as passive and dependent. In the intergenerational conversation, themes of decrement and disadvantage are engendered and sustained largely through initiatives taken by Jenny. Rather than being rejected, these are generally endorsed by May. Thus, May’s disadvantaged elderly identity in this encounter is co-constructed by both participants. In this conversation it is Jenny who takes the initiative, exerting interactional control by posing other-oriented questions, initiating topics, and so forth. The tone of this conversation is generally serious; Jenny adopts a sympathetic and nurturing approach, making assumptions about May’s life position which seem based on negative, stereotypical perceptions of the state of being an elderly recipient of care. For example, Jenny suggests that it is “good for” May to go “somewhere like this” (the day center). As the conversation develops, this institutional theme is taken up by May: “If I didn’t go on a van [to the day center] I’d have to stay home,” which effectively establishes her dependent role. Jenny’s nurturing and concern, while caring at one level, also reinforces the dependent role. Although May might not evaluate it as such, Jenny’s talk can be construed as over-accommodative. Her concerns to alleviate perceived difficulties are reminiscent of talk to children or to those who are chronically sick. By complying with and participating in this, May reinforces Jenny’s stereotypic assumptions and constructs a negative aging identity for herself. The results of the case study, while having very limited generalizability in themselves, suggest that “identity,” often taken as a relatively stable personal or social attribute, may in fact be variable and amenable to contextual delimitation. This has some potentially serious health and developmental consequences, especially if encounters such as the one described above are relatively frequent or typical sociolinguisticexperiences for older people.

EPILOGUE The interactive investigations described above open up issues about the ways in which intergenerationalconversations may reenact scenarios of ill-health, frailty, and inability. For example, the methods used for opening up, discussing, responding to, and closing PSDs illustrate how lifespan development, successful aging, and adaptation can be brought into play in interpersonal arenas. Hence, issues which feature as broad socio-psychological and developmental glosses in the current social gerontological literature are negotiated in the micro-contextsof talk. Efforts to manage identity, life transitions,and so on appear again and again in our extracts. The elicitation by younger women of age-consistent stereotypical responses, as well as older women’s willingness to frame their life experiences in these ways, feeds directly into the stress-adaptation-decline cycle described above. For example, closings may function as overall glosses, reinforcing or

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providing cognitive redefinitions of experience [39].It may be largely as a result of such encounters that adaptation occurs through processes of narration [51], reminiscing [52], and accounting, which leads to rationalization, resignation, and a host of other attribution processes [53]. Communication between disparate social groups does not necessarily facilitate successful adaptation or aging merely because it occurs. It is the quality of the communication that matters. The message transmitted (i.e., what is attended to, encoded, produced, and responded to) is affected by beliefs, assumptions, and stereotypes. In the case of communication and aging, frequent negative interactions between members of different social groups seem to spell out a less than optimistic stance for successful adaptation or lifespan development. Moreover, socially constructed decrement ideologies may become internalized into the personal and social identities of older people who, when provided with certain sociolinguistic and contextual cues, may respond by “acting out” stereotypical age identities. Of course, there is no shortage of societal cues, beyond interactional ones, to make age salient for older people in Western societies, as analyses of literature, humor, magazine fiction, television drama, and commercials attest [54]. In day-to-day life, one can look at British road crossing signs and see the unflattering silhouette of older people, as well as instructions on public transportation which dictate the use of certain seats for the “physically handicapped and the elderly.” The British Medical Association recently talked of the “elderly health disaster,” and the British publication New Society also carried an article on the “elderly health burden.” Although such linguistic associations are undoubtedly not mooted with agist intent, they nevertheless can function inadvertently alongside the myriad of other social representations of older people to fashion and sustain our emotional reactions to and beliefs about older people and growing older. It is our contention that many Western societies (and we are currently pursuing East-West comparisons) have far too narrow, decrementally defined stereotypes for templating and processing older communication. Even when coming across a counter-stereotypic older person in an intergenerational contact program or on TV,we can easily discount him or her as having zero relevance to the general category of older people [55].Therefore, social stereotypes will remain unchallenged. In this vein, newspaper articles which extol1 the virtues and capacities of certain older people are not uncommon. Familiar headlines read: “At eighty-five, still provocative,” “Creative couple enjoy twilight years,” and “Life’s still a spree at ninety-three.” Despite communications inevitably fulfilling multiple goals and consequences, one can not help interpreting the underlying message of these articles (and others like them) as reinforcing the belief that older people generally are not creative or provocative, that they do not enjoy boundless activity, and that these individuals were entertaining exceptions. Put another way, communication and intergroup theory already holds out much profound and immediate relevance in complementing current practice in interacting with and caring for a minority


social category which many of us will ultimately claim, be forced to acknowledge, or at least be reacted to as inhabiting [56]. Hence, without laying responsibility solely at the door of any one process, we begin to see some of the psychosociolinguisticmechanisms underlying the construction of aging and a contracted lifespan. By the time we reach retirement age, many of us will have been well-primed to accept the “reality” of decremental aging by unwittingly processing the complex of attributions we have referred to. As Baker’s data show, young people (in the United States) feel that a person’s social status decreases linearly from thirty years until the mid-eighties [57]; and the patterns of information-seekingwe have studied have also been shown to be related to a person’s age. Again, even in the quality newsmedia we can find decremental assumptions made in relation to being sixty-, fifty-, and forty-years of age [58]. We should carefully consider the cognitive and behavioral non-reactive stances most of us have traditionally taken to expressed agism, as they can contribute to unhealthy personal consequences as well as more generally, the reproduction of agist sentiments and policies. Unfortunately, many of us collude in propagating agist myths through humor, accounting for others’ and our own disappointments, failures, and so forth, in age-related terms. This collusion is doubtless an important element in the construction of our physical and psychological decline. As we argued elsewhere [59, p. 129, 1301: The admixture of fear, reticence and regret with which, facetiously or not, many middle-aged adults appear to represent their own aging, and the consequent teasing and chiding of those whose aging comes up for review, undoubtedly form part of the interactional means by which negative images of aging and the older are reproduced.

The aging process is, then, a developmental one to the extent that beliefs about aging and health, and the relationships between them, are socialized early in life and significant foundations are laid for the quality of older life. Attitudes toward language varieties and communication mediate both young people’s conceptions of older people’s interpretive and cognitive competences as well as their construals of their own capacities. Younger people’s communication includes over-accommodation, the sociolinguistic meanings of which can fuel older people’s helplessness, negative personal and social identities, and perceived, actual, and “instant” aging [60]. In these cases, and in the spontaneous evocation of elderly painful self-disclosure, sociolinguistic stereotypes are a potent force, especially in the construction and acceleration of aging. We have seen how communication between generations, as well as between older and younger peers, can confirm shared assumptions about elderliness and frailty. Even when utterances, such as surprise in response to age disclosures, are seemingly supportive, they are in fact a backhanded compliment. “Gosh you don’t look it,” implies that by rights you should. Being told that “you’re past it” implicitly constrains

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communicative potential and ultimately disposes older folk to self-stereotype as “old.” One might predict that uncrafted verbal balking against this may nonetheless result in agist stereotypes of an older person as being “grouchy” and “irritable.” This communication climate makes developmental adaptation and successful aging all the more difficult to attain. Different generation groups may well perceive each other much like different culture groups, perhaps because older and younger people inhabit different historical cohorts, often associated with different values and predispositions (communicative as well as non-communicative) and also have different problems (some existential) to which to adjust, somatically and life-historically. From a social psychological perspective the common bonds between age and culture arise as a result of categorization, stereotyping, prejudice, and intergroup behavior. Stereotypical perceptions of older (and younger) people stem almost inevitably from the process of categorization. Once a group has been identified and its members can be readily recognized (e.g., “baby boomers”), then a whole range of personality and behavioral characteristics can be universally applied to each and every member, often without differentiation [56]. Age stereotypes are well-documented in the social science literature [61, 621, and agism has taken its place alongside racism and sexism as a widespread social phenomenon [63]. Since generation groups may well perceive each other as akin to different cultures, cross-cultural perspectives may suggest some fruitful avenues to approaching developmental issues and intergenerational communication. An acknowledgement of the “biculturalism” of age should put us on the path towards effective “bilingualism.” We must learn from the history of other traditions of research into language and social categories (such as social class and gender), and move swiftly beyond the documentation of intercategory language and communicative differences toward an analysis of the communicative processes of agism and its relationship to sexism, classism, and racism. Moreover, further excursions into intercultural communication theory and research and immigrant acculturation may well point to important and hitherto unacknowledged processes inherent in aging as intercultural development. For example, it is commonly thought that certain cultures (e.g., collectivistic) respect and revere their elders more than others (e.g., individualistic). We have yet to establish whether or not this can be empirically demonstrated, but, if so, we have much to learn about the ways in which cultural values, mores, norms, and so on may impinge upon the treatment of older people in various societies. Our studies have already lead to a number of research offshoots. First, we have established that young people generally have negative assumptions about communicating with older persons. If younger people characterize intergenerational conversations as dissatisfying, we need to discover the particular dimensions that younger as well as older people identify as satisfying or dissatisfying, and what improvement strategies they envisage.


Second, as we have indicated above, our studies give us reason to hypothesize that under certain circumstances, older people engage in self-stereotyping processes “instantly aging” to the extent that they act out the characteristics (e.g., behavioral, communicative)-that they believe are prototypical of an aged social group. The negative consequences of this include the perpetuation of agist stereotypes as well as possible pervasive health consequences. These possibilities need to be explored far more systematically than we have done thus far, and in diverse settings. Third, our data give reason to suspect that community programs bringing together children and adolescents with senior citizens may not dispel stereotypes, as their investigators hope and assume. We could concur that certain interpersonal relationships between younger and older individuals can be rewarding, but we are unconvinced that negative stereotypes about older people as a social group in general are being disconfirmed. Similarly,we have doubts that TV programs such as “The Golden Girls,” while laudable for their attempts to provide older people with a voice and to tackle issues of agism in society, necessarily make any significant dent in widely-held negative views or deep-seated stereotypes. In this respect, studies which examine the communicative nature of TVhewspaper and actual intergenerationalcontact and its attributional consequencesfor stereotyping (thus far unexplored) will allow us to specify more clearly how, when, why, and which interventions may or may not succeed. Finally, educational programs for young people on “lifeskills” are almost always concerned with imparting knowledge and expertise about coping with the imminent problems of young adulthood only. Without negating the importance of this focus, we would contend that the parameters ofyouth education need to be extended to equip youngsters with the skills necessary to anticipate and cope with the aging process and its communicative demands. In short, we believe it is necessary to focus young people’s minds on and prepare them for successful developmental adaptation. We need to acknowledge that aging can be adaptational development, and need not be ineluctable decline. We need to develop sustained longitudinal, crosscultural programs of research grounded in both theory and practice, aimed at developing the community’s appreciation of the communicative and social processes involved in aging and agism. Much then needs to be done at the interfaces between communication, intergroup relations, aging, and health implicit in the above, as well as in the obvious roles of societal, cultural, sociodemographic, and individual difference factors (e.g., contextual and psychological age) in communicating about and across the lifespan. We are not suggesting that communicative processes themselves can account for the social construction of aging and death, or that recourse to both quantitative positivistic and qualitative social-constructivistmethods as described above has not caused us some epistemological dilemmas. Obviously, we need to move cautiously toward even more radical interdisciplinary positions to check out

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the boundaries of our explanatory roles and forge connections with other societal as well as biological processes. Indeed, Branco and Williamson’s perspective on the economic parameters of and historical fluctuations in age stereotyping forms a useful backdrop [64]. Yet by accommodating language groups, and dilemmas in this way, we can be theoretically more incisive, construe communication in a less agist manner, and pursue the ways in which our views about our aging selves are negotiated in discourse. After all, the study of language in its social context is not merely a mike and recorder, pencil and paper, or tape and transcription enterprise; it is one which is intimately related to blood and guts, life and death issues across the lifespan. REFERENCES 1. J. F. Nussbaum, Life-Span Communication:Normative Processes, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1989. 2. Y. Y. Kim, Communication and Cross-Cultural Adaptation: An Integrative Theory, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters Ltd., England, 1988. 3. R. L. Harris, A. M. Ellicott, and D. S. Holmes, The Timing of Psychosocial Transitions and Changes in Women’s Lives: An Examination of Women Aged 45-60, Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 51, pp. 409-416,1986. 4. G. Labouvie-Vief, J. Hakim-Larson, and C. Hobart, Age, Ego Level and the Lifespan Development of Coping and Defense Processes, Psychology and Aging, 2, pp. 286-293,1987. 5 . A. V. Wister, Environmental Adaptation by Persons in their Later Life, Research on Aging, 11, pp. 267-291,1989. 6. J. Nussbaum, Successful Aging: A Communication Model, CommunicationQuarterly, 33, pp. 262-269,1985. 7. C. D. Ryff, Happiness is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meanings of Psychological Well-being, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, pp. 1069-1081,1989. 8. C. Peterson, M. Seligman, and G. Vaillant, Pessimistic Explanatory Style is a Risk Factor for Physical Illness: A Thirty-Five Year Longitudinal Study, Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology, 55, pp. 23-27,1988. 9. H. Giles, A. Williams, and N. Coupland, Communication Health and the Elderly: Frameworks, Agenda and a Model, in Communication, Health and the Elderly: Fulbright International Colloquium, 8, H. Giles, N. Coupland, and J. Wiemann (eds.), Manchester University Press, Manchester, England, 1990. 10. A. Williams, H. Giles, N. Coupland, M. Dalby, and H. Manasse, The Communicative Contexts of Elderly Social Support and Health: A Theoretical Model, Health Communication, 2, pp. 123-145,1990. 11. D. Riley and J. Eckenrode, Social Ties: Subgroup Differences in Costs and Benefits, Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 15, pp. 770-778,1986. 12. K. S. Rook,The Negative Side of Social Interaction,Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology, 46, pp. 1097-1108,1984.

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Direct reprint requests to: Howard Giles Department of Communication University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020

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