Showing papers by "Howard Giles published in 1989"

Telling age in later life: Identity and face implications

Abstract: The disclosure of age-in-years in later life is a frequent characteristic of intergenerational talk among first-acquaintances. Qualitative analyses of particular sequences show that considerations of age and of appraised health/wellbeing are structurally interrelated in these disclosures. Through this relationship, chronological age can function as a token in the bilateral negotiation of age-identities in discourse. Despite its ritualised character, age-disclosure can impact significantly on elderly people's self-esteem and on cross-generation attitudes. Variably, at different points in the life-span, taboos and normative prescriptions are associated with both seeking and providing information about age. Personal experience (in the absence of empirical studies) suggests that children and adolescents are often asked to tell their age by distant relatives or new acquaintances, or have this information revealed for them by parents or guardians. Inquiring about age in these contexts, to the extent that it is more than ritualised, seems to be part of a signalling of engagement and perhaps nurturance by well-meaning adults interested in following the growth and development of the young. In the middle years of life, age-in-years, and perhaps all discussion of own age, drops out of unmarked usage, appearing to feature predominantly in mockdenigrating remarks about the passing of time, references to the unwanted arrival of birthdays, commercially promoted through the greetings-card industry. Age-talk finds its place as part of a broad spread of ageist constructions in Western society across several domains — literature (Berman and Sobkowska-Ashcroft, 1986), humour (Palmore, 1971), magazine fiction (Martel, 1968), television drama and commercials (Kubey, 1980). The admixture of fear, reticence and regret with which, facetiously or 01655-4888/89/0009-0129 $2.00 Text 9 (2) (1989), pp. 129-151 © Mouton de Gruyter 130 Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland and Howard Giles not, many middle-aged adults appear to represent their own ageing, and the consequent teasing and chiding of those whose ageing comes up for review, undoubtedly form part of the interactional means by which negative images of ageing and the elderly are reproduced (cf. Kenwood, N. Coupland, J. Coupland and Giles, submitted). Images crassly invoked here amount to a checklist of negative elderly stereotypes: frailty, sexual inactivity, incompetence, grouchiness, unsociability, and so on (Braithwaite, 1986; Giles, N. Coupland, Kenwood, Harriman and J. Coupland (in press); Stewart and Ryan, 1982). Within this calendar-marking tradition and associated discourses, personal life-spans are viewed as incremented scales with natural boundaries which are bench-marks to decrement: physical, social and socio-psychological (cf. Branco and Williamson, 1982; N. Coupland and J. Coupland, in press b). Decade-boundaries seem to have a particular salience in this respect, as do transitions from one generational category to another (parent to grandparent, for example). On the other hand, in old age, the life-span territory we explore in this paper, age-in-years re-surfaces from its underground life. The data we draw on, from two audio-recorded contexts, confirm the prevalence of disclosing chronological age (DCA) among at least some elderly groups. Given the pejorative associations of advancing age among younger groups (as we have speculatively sketched them), we are led to ask why elderly DCA might be not only tolerated but positively construed on occasions. The particular aim of the paper is therefore to consider the social functioning of DCA in context, and to achieve this through examining the discursive sequences and routines through which, in our data, age-disclosure is managed. Our interpretations are couched in terms of age-identity, and more particularly the various elderly-identifications that DCA can encode. For this reason, we begin with a brief consideration of the diverse literatures that have been concerned with age-identity and age-marking in later life. Approaches to age-identity An early experimental psychological tradition (for example, Tuckman and Lorge, 1954; Riley and Foner, 1968) was concerned to assess elderly self-concepts, and found a common tendency for ageing people to 'deny' their elderliness, judging themselves as younger than their chronological age in years. More recent research has explored different interpretations of such age-categorizations (see, for example, Guptill, 1969; Mutran and Burke, 1979), though methodological criticisms have also been made (cf. Telling age in later life 131 Breytespraak and George, 1979). A recent, more global 'life-position indicator' is Rubin and Rubin's (1982; 1986) index of'contextual age', a questionnaire-based measure aggregating objective and subjective dimensions of elderly people's health, mobility, finances, social networks, and other variables. On the other hand, symbolic interactionists (see, for example, Spence, 1986) and Meadian theorists (Chappell and Orbach, 1986) have argued for studying the ageing self as process rather than in static terms. It is this tradition of concern for 'identity-in-the-world' (Ainley and Redfoot, 1982) which is most receptive to the discourse analytic approaches to identity that Potter and others (Potter 1988; Potter and Wetherell, 1987) have argued for. (For a more detailed review, see J. Coupland, N. Coupland, Giles and Kenwood, in press) Still, linguistic studies of age-categories and age-references are rare. There have been some literary and dictionary analyses (Berman and Sobkowska-Ashcroft, 1986; Covey, 1988), and occasional experimental studies (for example, Nuessel, 1982; Rodin and Langer, 1980). Barbato and Feezel (1987) asked people in three age-bands (17-44, 45-64, 65 + years) to rate a list of 10 terms referring to an elderly person on five semantic differential scales. Predictably, terms including 'senior citizen', 'retired person' and 'mature American' were more favourably perceived than, for example, 'elderly', Old', and Old folks'; there were few differences between the responses of different age-groups. Research of this sort needs to confront the criticisms (for instance of Potter and Wetherell, 1987, ch. 6) that group-attributes and even social categories themselves are not static givens, and can be constructed out of the socio-psychological needs and goals of interactants in discourse. As a result, the objective of obliterating ageist terms from the language (Oyer and Oyer, 1976) may be misguided, ignoring the essential creativity of group-attributions and hence ageism in context, and their consequent resistance to change (cf. Singh, Lele and Martohardjono, 1988; Snyder, 1981). In a recent paper (J. Coupland, N. Coupland, Giles and Henwood, in press), we have attempted to overview the range of processes by means of which age-identity is marked, variably and negotiatively, in intergenerational talk. We have identified two broad categories of such processes. First, 'Age-Categorisation Processes', subsuming direct and indirect references to the elderly participant's group-membership, time of life, generational role, etc., identification of frailty and age-associable problematical circumstances (cf. N. Coupland, J. Coupland, Giles, Henwood and Wiemann, 1988), and the disclosure of chronological age. As a second general set, we consider 'Temporal Framing Processes', which include the adding of a time-past perspective to current issues (cf. Boden and Bielby, 1986), elderly people self-associating with the past, and the 132 Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland and Howard Giles recognising of historical/cultural/social change. Intergenerational talk in the first-acquaintance interactions under investigation was in fact imbued with interweaving age-identity-marking processes under these headings, though highly specific contextualisation possibilities and implications are associated with each dimension. Our earlier overview has been unable to explore the sequential characteristics of each of these processes in individual sequences of talk, though it is, we argue, at this level that interpretive inferences of goals and consequences are most secure. It is against this background that, in the present paper, we examine the management of chronological age-disclosure as a particular and particularly focused means of negotiating elderly identity in conversation.

Ethnic Identification, Language, and Values: The Case of Polish Emigres.

Abstract: Ethnic values have been studied as a function of group membership, the latter's criteria invariably being objective and external. Negligible attention, however, has been paid empirically to the effects of subjective definitions of ethnic group memberships on value expression. To such an end, this study in Britain examined the values of 90 Polish emigres by means of the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS). Informants were divided into three levels of Polish cultural identification and administered the RVS in either Polish or English. A principal components analysis yielded a five‐factor solution and subsequent 3×2 ANOVAs on the factor scores showed predictable differences between the three subgroups on the first two factors, labelled ‘spirituality’ and ‘traditional/conservative responsibility’. Language of testing interacted in complex, but interpretable, ways with cultural identification on the first factor and fifth (viz. ’self‐satisfaction'). A follow‐up study in Tasmania yielded both similarities and d...