How do non-Western societies envisage the relationship between the body and ageing? The present work aimed to shed light on this question by exploring how adult men and women of different ages living in Dakar, Senegal, view their bodies. A quantitative methodology was selected, and this study was carried out on a sample of 1,000 dwellers of the Senegalese capital, aged 20 and older. This sample was constructed using the quota method in order to strive for representativeness. Results indicate that appearance was highly important for Senegalese women and men, and for younger and older adults alike. As in Western cultures, beauty and youth were strongly connected. The large majority of Senegalese women and men were satisfied with their looks across the lifespan. However, older women were slightly less satisfied, consistent with the double standard hypothesis. Little discrepancy was found between felt age and chronological age throughout the entire lifecourse, arguing against an ageless self hypothesis in this African population. The mask of ageing hypothesis was also rejected, as men's and women's identification with their body did not diminish significantly across age. These observations from an African perspective call for greater attention to the ageing process in non-Western societies in order to challenge hypotheses developed in Western societies and understand more broadly the role of culture.

The portrayal of older characters in television commercials has over time become more varied and positive. This study examines how different portrayals of older characters relate to self-stereotyping, a process through which older individuals apply their beliefs about older people in general to themselves and behave accordingly. The study thereby seeks to connect, as few have previously done, cultural studies and critiques of media portrayals with psychological studies of the effects of self-stereotyping. Sixty participants aged 65–75 years were primed with television commercials that portrayed older characters in different ways: ‘warm and incompetent’, ‘warm and competent’, and ‘cold and competent’. It was hypothesised that priming with warm/incompetent portrayals would have a negative effect on memory performance because such representations match the dominant stereotype, and that the effect would occur only among older people who identify with their own age group. It was found that the participants who identified with their own age group did indeed show impaired memory performance after priming with warm/incompetent portrayals, but also that the same effect was found after priming with warm/competent portrayals. The findings are discussed in terms of resistance against stereotyping by older individuals themselves as well as by media producers.

This paper is a study of the discursive management of notions of change and continuity in interview talk. It presents selected short empirical examples from interviews with 22 Finnish baby-boomers, and discusses the methodological and theoretical issues that arise. Following a review of the major approaches to the study of age identity, the analytic intersection between qualitative gerontology and discursive psychology is explored. The analysis identifies how the frequent use of a ‘provisional continuity device’ enables speakers simultaneously both to acknowledge and to distance themselves from factual notions of physical or psychological lifespan change. The key methodological argument is that the discursive analysis of age-in-interaction cannot necessarily be achieved through the myopic micro-study of discursive strategies, but rather two suggestions are made. First, it is argued that analytically-anchored and rigorous discursive gerontology that both systematically draws on and contributes to the broad field of discursive research provides a means by which to test empirically post-modern conceptualisations of age identity. Second, it is suggested that analyses of age-talk in everyday and institutional settings provide an analytical and theoretical middle-ground between the macro versus micro or ‘microfication’ debate in gerontology.

This paper examines, through discourse analysis at a micro level, how age identities become interactionally constructed through talk. After a brief overview of the constructivist arguments, the focus is on a single-case interaction between an older client couple and three travel agency assistants. The various means by which age is made salient by the participants and the ensuing age identities that are created for and by the couple in particular are investigated. The images of the ‘elderly’ as portrayed in holiday brochures, providing one dimension of the context of this encounter and being significant in older travellers' self-identity construction, are also looked at. It is argued that discourse analysis has a useful contribution to make in social gerontology in that it can illuminate the interactive processes through which ageing and old age can be defined.