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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2223
igaa057.2223
Abstracts
Session 5870 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
What Is Ageism? Do Our Measures Tell Us?
Lee Jerin 1 Wilson Jenna 2 Ebert Alexandria 2 Shook Natalie 1 1 
University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States
2 
West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”646 646
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Ageism has been operationalized in a number of ways over the past half century, and several measures of ageism have been developed to reflect these conceptualizations. This presentation evaluates the extent to which existing ageism measures capture similar or different aspects of ageism. We examined the construct validity of several ageism measures in a sample of 473 undergraduate students (Mage = 19.5 years). Participants completed an online survey of ageism measures, as well as measures of convergent (e.g., aging semantic differentials, attitudes toward various age groups) and discriminant validity (e.g., social dominance orientation, attitudes toward other social groups, sexism). Ageism measures were generally positively associated with one another, though correlations were mostly weak to moderate in magnitude. There was also weak evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. These findings demonstrate conceptual problems with current ageism measures as they do not appear to reflect a common construct.