Age Vitality Across Eleven Nations

This paper is the second in a series of empirical applications of the concept of (ethnolinguistic) vitality into the intergenerational arena. It examines young people's assessments of the subjective vitalities of young, middle-aged, and elderly targets in four Western (midwest USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and seven south and east Asian sites (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, mainland China, The Philippines, and India). The results support earlier findings (in Hong Kong and California) in that, relative to young adult targets, the elderly were rated as having more vitality in the Western than the south and east Asian settings; the middle-aged were seen as having the highest vitality across all nations. Differences in the age vitality profiles between the different nations allowed identification of three distinct patterns. The study also provided intriguing cross-cultural data on how respondents construed the on-sets of young adulthood, middle age, and old age as well as the ends of the former two categories. The findings are related to other cross-cultural studies of intergenerational communication and age stereotyping, and future research directions are highlighted.