How ageist is Britain?
Very
So it would seem from a recent Age Concern survey. The main findings:
- From 55 years old ageism outweighs any other form of discrimination including gender or ethnicity
- Young people feel they are dismissed as shallow larger louts sometimes as well
- One third of respondents said they found people over 70 as ‘incompetent and incapable’
- One third of people over 50 but under the state retirement age are not in paid employment
Methodology
- Sample size: 1800 roughly, so sampling error is around 2%, and a ‘representative sample’ of people over 16 was constructed – which I take to be a stratified sample so age groups represented composition of population in UK
- Questions were piloted first
- Questions and percentages in each response category broken down by age group are available in the summary report
- I have registered interest in the full report as a teaching aid – we shall see