Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
-
Virpi Ylänne
Abstract
As part of a larger research project on images of older people (the over sixties) in UK advertising, this article reports findings from a focus group study in which participants discussed their views on seven TV advertisements depicting older people as central characters. These were selected from a sample of TV ads broadcast in the United Kingdom between 1999 and 2004, and included a range of positive, humorous, negative, and vulnerable depictions. A total of nine focus groups each comprised of three subgroups: young, middle-aged, and older adults. In addition to the ads themselves, our analysis centers on the participants' reactions to the ads. Our focus is on the discursive positioning of the discussants vis-à-vis the ads in terms of age stereotypes and age identity constructions for self and other. Participants not only comment on any perceived depictions of older age, they also position themselves, and others, age-wise, in relation to the depictions, and at times use their age identifications as discursive means to account for their views. The focus on how viewers align with these types of ads can be seen as an important addition to previous research on images of aging in advertising, as well as on talk about age. In our analysis, we make use of the theoretical notions of discursive construction of age and positioning theory.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Preface: commemorating the 200th issue of IJSL
- Introduction: aging and language
- Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?
- Gaelic on the Isle of Skye: older speakers' identity in a language-shift situation
- Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth
- Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
- First language attrition and reversion among older migrants
- Managing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly: humor as a mitigating resource
- Beyond stereotypes of old age: the discourse of elderly Japanese women
- The multifaceted category of “generation”: elderly French men and women talking about May '68
- Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
- Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
- The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe, by Tomasz Kamusella
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Preface: commemorating the 200th issue of IJSL
- Introduction: aging and language
- Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?
- Gaelic on the Isle of Skye: older speakers' identity in a language-shift situation
- Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth
- Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
- First language attrition and reversion among older migrants
- Managing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly: humor as a mitigating resource
- Beyond stereotypes of old age: the discourse of elderly Japanese women
- The multifaceted category of “generation”: elderly French men and women talking about May '68
- Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
- Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
- The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe, by Tomasz Kamusella
