Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (4)
- Article (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (5)
Keywords
- Altenbild (5) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (4)
- Peer-Review (1)
Publisher
- Dudenverlag (1)
- Lang (1)
- Sage Publishing (1)
- Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften (1)
- Wiesbaden (1)
Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individuallevel information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients (M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses (M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (k = .85 to k = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.
In youth research as well as in research in old age, there has been a tendency to examine each generation separately - an approach that tries to comprehend youth and old age within their respective boundaries, as isolated entities. However, by neglecting the interrelations between the different generations, several key aspects that are crucial to the formation of their respective identity remain elusive. Given a model of three generations - of youth, middle generation and old age -, both youth and old age share a common social dependency on the middle generation in many respects. Moreover, those generations are dominated by the middle one and only take a marginal position in comparison. The relation between the surrounding generations and the ‘middle’ generation (for which there is no proper term actually) could be described best as “not yet” or “not any more”. These circumstances certainly have an impact on the formation of individual identity within the generations of youth and old age: the process of evaluating the norms, values, models and ideals of the middle generation (which are central to and preferred by society) plays a substantial role in the development of identity. The course of this process and its outcome are often similar with both the young and the elderly people, whilst there are also clear differences. In my contribution, I would like to outline the ramifications of this social dependence with regard to the impact it has on the formation of identity in the generation of the elderly people. Similarly, I intend to give impetus to a reflection on the forms of interdependence between the young and the middle generation as well as between the young and the elderly. Also, I would like to discuss the effects these interrelations have on young people’s identity.