Do middle school students really have fixed images of elders?

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine whether combinations of characteristics, abstracted from drawings of elders made by middle school students, grouped together to form cohesive perceptions, or stereotypes, of human aging.

Methods: We abstracted 49 characteristics from drawings of elders made by 1,944 students at two middle schools in San Antonio, Texas, at the beginning of the 1998-1999 school year. Correlational and factor analyses were used to determine if there was an underlying structure or grouping to the characteristics.

Sentence completion to assess children's views about aging.

Purpose: Sentence completion exercises require students to give open-ended responses to prompts. The first purpose of this article is to describe the method of sentence completion to assess middle-school children's attitudes and beliefs about aging. The second purpose is to describe the patterns of characteristics that children associate with aging.