An initial cross-cultural assessment of attitudes toward the elderly

As the proportion of elderly persons comprising the population of developing and industrialized countries continues to increase, issues involving the elderly and attitudes toward the elderly will become more salient. The structure and components of attitudes held regarding the elderly need to be better understood. This need calls for instruments capable of measuring attitudes about the elderly across cultural contexts. The present paper reports an investigation of attitude structure and the development of two attitude scales using Likert scaling techniques combined with factor analysis. A pool of items was generated in English and in Spanish and subsequently endorsed by 396 individuals, 202 English and 194 Spanish native speakers. Factor analysis performed separately on results from the two language groups produced consistent results: one group of items loaded on a factor called positivity toward the elderly and the other group loaded on a factor called negativity toward the elderly. Theoretical implications of these findings were discussed and equivalent forms of positivity and negativity scales in English and Spanish were presented for use in further research.