ABSTRACT
As the last chapter demonstrated, research about social attitudes toward older people reveals that age stereotypes, especially negative stereotypes, are quite widespread in our society, and are constituted and manifest in various aspects of communication, including interpersonal (peer and intergenerational) and mass communication. Communication scholars interested in aging have argued that there is a transactional relationship between age stereotypes and language and communication behavior (Harwood, Giles, & Ryan, 1995; Hummert, 1994). For the most part, research interest has centered on how attitudes, stereotypes, and communication-related beliefs influence perceptions of, and communication with, older people (see Hummert, Garstka, & Shaner, 1995, for an extended review of this literature). There is also some interest in how stereotypes may be produced as post hoc accounts for communication problems, and miscommunication (e.g., Giles, Henwood, Coupland, Harriman, & Coupland, 1992; Williams, 1996).
