Abstract
Objectives
Older adults experience higher risks of getting severely ill from COVID-19, resulting in widespread narratives of frailty and vulnerability. We test: (1) Whether global aging narratives have become more negative from before to during the pandemic (Oct’19 to May’20) across 20 countries; (2) Model pandemic (incidence and mortality), and cultural factors associated with the trajectory of aging narratives.
Methods
We leveraged a 10-billion-word online-media corpus, consisting of 28 million newspaper and magazine articles across 20 countries, to identify nine common synonyms of ‘older adults’ and compiled their most frequently-used descriptors (collocates) from Oct’19 to May’20—culminating in 11,504 collocates that were rated to create a Cumulative-Aging-Narrative-Score-(CANS) per month. Widely used cultural dimension scores were taken from Hofstede, and pandemic variables, from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker.
Results
Aging narratives became more negative as the pandemic worsened across 20 countries. Globally, scores were trending neutral from Oct’19 to Feb’20, and plummeted in Mar’20, reflecting COVID-19’s severity. Pre-pandemic (Oct’19), UK evidenced the most negative aging narratives; peak-pandemic (May’20), South Africa took on the dubious honor. Across the 8-month period, Philippines experienced the steepest trend towards negativity in aging narratives. Ageism, during the pandemic, was ironically, not predicted by COVID-19’s incidence and mortality rates, but by cultural variables: Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long-term Orientation.
Discussion
The strategy to reverse this trajectory lay in the same phenomenon that promoted it: A sustained global campaign—though, it should be culturally nuanced and customized to a country’s context.
Factors Associated With Long-term Benzodiazepine Use Among Older Adults
