Aging Research Guide: Language

NPR's Ina Jaffe talks with Scott Simon (Host, Weekend Edition) about the struggle to find the right words to describe older people. Longevity and lifestyles have changed and the language hasn't kept up.

It’s surprisingly hard to find a good term for people in late life. This article is by Joe Pinsker, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers families and relationships.

When you are writing, you need to follow general principles to ensure that your language is free of bias. Here we provide guidelines for talking about age with inclusivity and respect. This guidance is from the American Psychological Association. Age is covered in Section 5.3 of the APA Publication Manual, Seventh Edition (2019). This guidance has been expanded from the 6th edition and is updated online at this location (date of latest update at bottom of the linked page)

Simply put, language matters. With input from our publisher (Wiley) and our JAGS Executive Leadership Group, JAGS is reinforcing that truth by adopting the American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style [then in its 10th edition] as our guide for manuscript submissions, with some important modifications to how we want JAGS authors to write about older people.2 The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) qualifies the AMA recommendation for referring to a person's age. Specifically, JAGS requires that authors use the term “older adult” when describing individuals aged 65 and older. Authors are also asked to provide a specific age range (e.g., “older adults aged 75 to 84”) when describing their research or making recommendations about patient care or the health of the population.

In June 2017, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) adopted the American Medical Association Manual of Style including qualified recommendations for the language used to describe older people. Based on American Geriatrics Society (AGS) work with the Leaders of Aging Organizations and the FrameWorks Institute, these recommendations were grounded in building better public perceptions of aging.1 They reinforced “that words like (the) aged, elder(s), (the) elderly, and seniors should not be used . . . because [they] connote discrimination and certain negative stereotypes.”1 The journal thus adopted “older adult(s)” and “older person/people” as preferred terminology, explicitly advocating against using “the elderly,” “senior(s),” and/or “senior citizen(s).”1

In the time since this transition, JAGS has published more than 5,000 pages of scholarly output, and many leading influencers in research have adopted our recommendations as their own.2 The AGS sought to determine how these recommendations impacted word choice across a variety of forums.