Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 19, 2023
Date Accepted: Aug 31, 2023
How Do Old Age and Youth Influence Portrayals of Doctors and Lawyers? An Analysis of Newspaper Reports over 200 Years
ABSTRACT
Background:
No studies have taken a historical lens to analyze how doctors have been portrayed in news media over two centuries. This is the first study to explore how categories of age (young and old) shape the portrayals of doctors and lawyers in newspapers over 210 years, from 1810 to 2019. Newspapers are an important source of current information and have to power to shape societal perceptions. Insights could be integrated into ongoing initiatives aimed at combating ageism in medicine.
Objective:
To determine whether old age or youth is valued in the legal and medical fields, we compare the difference in sentiments towards older and younger doctors as well as older and younger lawyers over a period of 210 years.
Methods:
Leveraging a 600-million-word corpus of American newspapers spanning 210 years, we compiled top descriptors (N=478,452) of nouns related to Youth × Occupation (e.g., young(er) doctor/physician) and Old Age × Occupation (e.g., old(er) doctor/physician). These descriptors were selected using an established criteria including co-occurrence frequency and context relevance, and were rated on a Likert scale from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive) to generate sentiment scores for ‘doctor/physician’, ‘young(er) doctor/physician’ and ‘old(er) doctor/physician’. The scores were calculated per decade for 21 decades from 1810 to 2019.
Results:
As hypothesized, there was a youth premium for doctors, with portrayals of younger doctors becoming 10% more positive, and those of older doctors becoming 1.4% more negative over 210 years. There was an age premium for lawyers, whereby positive portrayals of older lawyers increased by 22.6% over time, while those of younger lawyers experienced a 4.3% decrease.
Conclusions:
Ageism manifests itself differently across medicine and law. Insights from this study could be integrated into ongoing initiatives to combat age stereotypes against both older and younger professionals in the medical and legal fields. Clinical Trial: NA
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