How Age-Friendly Are the People in Your World?

You are undoubtedly familiar with the extent to which ageism pervades society. Each day brings some news that refers to older people disparagingly as “elderly,” or worse, “senile.” If you’re an older individual, or even someone over 40, you may think you can brush these off with a laugh or a shrug. However, a recent U.S. survey revealed that not only is ageism everywhere, but it can become internalized (Allen et al. 2022). These internalized stereotypes can affect your health and, research has shown, even actual cognitive performance, especially if the older participants have come to believe that aging is synonymous with dementia (Caughie et al. 2023).

As you look about your own environment, though, what evidence can you find that the people in it share these negative views about aging? If you’re already sporting a few gray hairs, do you sense that others are treating you unfairly because of your age?

Age-Friendly Environments

In an effort to combat worldwide ageism, the World Health Organization declared as part of its Sustainability Development Goals that if there is ever to be a time when older adults can feel not just accepted, but maximize their mental and physical health, it is necessary to start creating “age-friendly environments.” These environments should be accepting and inclusive of older adults, or people of any age, and also promote positive intergenerational relationships.

The age-friendly environment movement can be seen in such areas as age-friendly communities and healthcare. In 2015, organized by Dublin City University, the Age-Friendly University (AFU) Network was launched, and it now has global endorsements from major campuses.

This movement presents interesting challenges. How do you change negative attitudes that have become so ingrained, especially in academia (Whitbourne & Montepare, 2017), where older professors are sometimes seen as a drag on the system?

Inspired by the AFU ideals, my research team at UMass-Boston and Lasell University embarked in 2017 on a project to find out how far U.S. universities that are part of the network are from meeting the goals to which they signed on. We also believed that the goals, which focus on curriculum and outreach to older adults, should be expanded to include the ordinary nuts and bolts of campus life. Like any workplace environments, campuses have personnel issues to deal with (e.g. hiring and promotions), a physical component affecting mobility, and various resources and services to ensure that workers of all ages have access to health care and professional development.

Taking the Measure of Age-Friendliness

Think about your own workplace, school, or other organization of which you are a part. What policies and practices do you notice that are intended to make life easier for all, regardless of age? Do you see evidence of age bias in hiring? Are there barriers to mobility such as rickety stairs or dark hallways?

Over a period of several years and preliminary studies, our AFU research team honed a new measure of age-friendliness on college campuses with questions designed to measure both the existence of policies that promote age-inclusivity and the perceptions of people working on those campuses (Whitbourne et al., 2024). A core question in this research is that while those who run an organization may think that they’re being age inclusive (e.g. by following legal guidelines in hiring), do the people who exist in that organization actually know about these practices? This idea harkens back to a 1970s-style model known as “social ecology” which states that people have optimal mental and physical health when an organization follows through on its promises, leading to an ideal “match” between practices and perceptions.

Surveying 23 AFU campuses, our team took a two-pronged approach: We asked administrators to provide data on their age-inclusive practices such as availability of coursework on aging and then matched those responses to survey questions (administered to 6,831 students, faculty and staff) in which participants responded to questions asking whether they knew about the existence of aging-related courses. Participants also rated themselves on their feelings about how respected, welcomed, and comfortable they felt on campus (“Age-Friendly” score).

The statistical test of the match model, using data from administrators on practices, constituents’ perceptions of these practices, and beliefs about the value of age inclusivity, confirmed the prediction that Age-Friendly scores reflected degree of match. The data also revealed another disturbing but perhaps not surprising result: Out of a possible range of 0 to 1, the degree of awareness by campus members of age-friendly practices only amounted to .38. In other words, campus administrators “thought” they were being age-friendly, but their efforts went largely unrecognized.

Looking Through the Age-Friendly Lens in Your Life

If even well-intentioned institutions of higher education could miss the mark when delivering practices designed to promote age-inclusivity, what does this imply about the rest of the world? Think about your own workplace, either current or past. Your break room probably contains posters about age discrimination, and it’s likely you’ve gone to workshops on the topic. But how many times were you part of conversations in which an older worker (or you) felt disrespected and overlooked?

Aging Essential Reads

Keeping Things the Same Requires Making Changes

How Others View Your Attempts to Look Younger

You don’t even have to think about a workplace; just consider the average movie theater. After the lights go down, it’s hard to find your way back to your seat if you needed to use the restroom. If you’ve gone to a live theater production, that restroom is likely to involve long lines and be located down two flights of stairs. Yet, these are public places that are supposed to “disability-friendly.”

University campuses, similarly, have buildings that are large, difficult to navigate, and not necessarily all that well maintained. There is little that administrators can do to fix all this, although this doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t initiate serious accessibility discussions. When it comes to the “people” component, though, what are the strategies that they (or your own workplace) could institute? The UMass Boston team is also investigating these (Bowen et al., 2024) based on the findings of the “match” study.

Practical strategies that could heighten everyone’s sensitivity to issues of ageism are achievable; getting people talking about age bias is a very simple first step. But even before that, you need to perform your own assessments of where your organization succeeds and where it falls short. Just by asking the right questions, you can start to implement changes, even though these may seem small.

To sum up, an age-friendly world is a laudable goal. Making your own world just a little bit more accepting of people can help promote everyone’s fulfillment, no matter their age.