Social Representations of Older Adults Among Chilean Elders of Three Cities with Different Historical and Sociodemographic Background

Abstract

The study was aimed to explore social representations of older adults among Chilean people aged 70 or more, living in three cities with differences in historical, geographic, and sociodemographic characteristics and to explore the importance of the local context on their shaping. Multiple correspondence analysis was employed to analyze the terms produced through free-word association technique, by 741 people. The two first dimensions explained 62.4 % of the inertia and showed that the contribution of city of residence was several times higher than the average; the contribution of gender and educational level was higher than average as well. The northern city representations were characterized by positive terms, whereas more negative contents were characteristic of the city of the center, and terms without an explicitly positive or negative assessment were associated to the southern city. These findings reinforce the relevance of the local sociocultural context in shaping social representations of old age and stress the importance of considering particular regional features in the design of policies and interventions aimed to recognize and integrate older adults in Chile.

Keywords: Aging; Correspondence analysis; Latin America; Older adults; Social representations.