Attitudes toward age: an exploration in school-age children

Attitudes toward young, middle-age, and old persons were studied in 1000 children (grades 6, 8, 10, 12). Three newspaper photographs were presented to the children, who estimated the persons' ages and wrote stories about each photograph in his preferred order. Scores from a semantic differential which provided three factors, Evaluation, Affect, and Activity-Potency, were used in a three-way analyses of variance to analyze further children's attitudes. The overriding impression from these findings is that these school children do not share the allegedly general, negative attitude toward old age. The age estimates showed judgmental accuracy and were remarkably uniform in both central tendency and variation. The overall order of choice was young person, first; old person, second; and middle-age person, last.