Media and age-coded representations of later life: An analysis of selected print advertisements of English-language magazines in India

ABSTRACT

This study examines the representation of older adults in print advertisements in an English-language magazine in post-reform India. Employing content analysis, this study finds a growing disenchantment of the Indian media with the image of a “happy joint family.” A higher proportion of older adults are now portrayed alone or with younger adults compared to earlier portrayals with people of all age groups in an ad. Further, the portrayal of older adults as both parent and grandparent in the same ad has also reduced over the years, hinting at the restructured ideas of time, successful aging, and later life identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Age-code
• content analysis
• later-life identities
• print advertisements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Kathleen Wordward (2006), in her work on performing gender and age in the context of Hollywood movies, points out that the older female body becomes hypervisible and invisible. She argues that by focusing on what she terms as “the youthful structure of the look”—the culturally induced tendency to degrade and reduce an older person to the prejudicial category of old age—the older female character is described only in terms of her negatively connoted features of her appearance. Later, this character is eliminated from the movie, making the female aging invisible. She states, “In our mass-mediated society, age and gender structure each other in a complex set of reverberating feedback loops, conspiring to render the older female body paradoxically both hypervisible and invisible. It would seem that the wish of our visual culture is to erase the older female body from view. The logic of the disappearing female body would seem to be this: first we see it, then we don’t” (p. 163).

² Drawing from previous research (Robinson & Skill, 1995; Swayne & Greco, 1987), older adults were identified based on the appearance of a combination of two or more factors such as gray hair; wrinkled skin on face and hands; retirement scenarios; use of ambulatory aids such as canes, walkers, and wheelchairs; presence of middle-aged children and/or presence of grandchildren; reference to their age in the image or the text of the ad; use of terms such as old, senior, or aging for them in the ad. In cases of celebrities and other popular personalities, their chronological age was confirmed based on publicly available information on the internet.

³ Raman et al. (2008), in their comparative study on the representation of older adults in popular media in India and the United States, identified six family roles that older adults could be portrayed as or portrayed with—grandchild, child, grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse/significant other. We dropped the categories of child and sibling in our analysis since we were unable to identify any models in these categories while developing the coding frame.

⁴ Erving Goffman, in his seminal work “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959), explores how actors through various dramaturgical practices try to create and control their impressions in everyday interactions. An actor, according to Goffman, creates these impressions about his identities through various performances.

⁵ West and Zimmerman (1987), drawing from Goffman’s idea of performance, argue that gender, as master identity cutting across various social roles, is socially constructed through performances in everyday interactions.

⁶ “Identity becomes a ‘moveable’ feast formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surrounds us… . Within us are contradictionary (sic) identities pulling in different directions, so that our identifications are continuously being shifted about” (Hall et al., 1992, p. 277).