01 Section B Option 3, Key question 1 - Young and older people in media representations (part 4)

Visibility, stereotypes and voice

Media representation involves choices about which people appear, how they are presented and whose account of events matters.

A representation is a constructed portrayal: a news report, advertisement or fictional story selects details and gives them meaning. It is not a complete reflection of the group portrayed. An editor might select a photograph of teenagers arguing rather than another of them helping at a community event. Both events could be real, but the selection invites different judgements about young people.

Distinguish three questions. Visibility concerns how frequently a group appears and in which settings. Portrayal concerns the roles, traits and judgements attached to it. Voice concerns whether people can explain their own experiences or are mainly described by others. In fiction, also consider agency: whether a character makes decisions that shape the story or merely helps another character develop. An older character who appears in every episode but only provides advice to a younger hero is visible without necessarily having an independent storyline.

These dimensions can move in different directions. More images of young people do not necessarily mean a wider range of portrayals. More coverage of youth violence might increase visibility while narrowing the association with youth. Equally, a sympathetic account of older people can still be paternalistic if younger experts speak for them and they are depicted only as needing help. Ageism means prejudice or discrimination based on age; it can concern younger as well as older people. A negative depiction of one individual is not automatically ageist. The stronger concern is an unjustified generalisation, exclusion or recurring age-based hierarchy.

The categories also need checking. “Young” and “old” are not universal research categories. Studies use different age boundaries, and a 55-year-old and a 90-year-old may have very different circumstances. A character's age is also not necessarily the actor's age. Always state what a particular study counted before comparing its findings with another.

Consider this original teaching example. A local television report shows several teenagers at a cancelled youth-club session, but only the council leader explains the closure. The teenagers are visible, yet viewers hear little about what the club meant to them. Giving them speaking time could broaden the account; it would not require treating every teenager's view as identical or automatically correct.

Young people: contrasting images

Young people can be represented as threats, vulnerable people, successful celebrities or individuals with complex everyday lives.

Wayne, Henderson, Murray and Petley (2008) analysed UK television news from May 2006. The dataset included six main news programmes and Newsround as a comparison; 2,130 stories were fully coded. They defined young people as aged 14–25 and identified 286 stories with youth as a main focus. Of those youth-focused stories, 47% concerned crimes committed by young people. This measures a pattern in selected news stories, not the proportion of young people who committed crime. One month, prominent events and the approaching football World Cup limit generalisation to other periods or media. Wayne et al., original article.

The sociological issue is the connection audiences are invited to make. Repeatedly selecting youth for crime stories can make “young person” seem like a warning category. Viewers may encounter fewer accounts of routine work, care or participation. Coverage can also frame young people as vulnerable victims. That challenges the idea that they are always dangerous, but may still leave adults as the people with knowledge and authority. A report can combine both images: youth appear as a risk to society and as people who need protection.

Positive representations require examination too. A successful young celebrity may challenge an image of failure, yet an emphasis on exceptional fame can leave ordinary lives out of view. Commercial media can present youth as attractive, fashionable consumers. This recognises an audience and a market, but can suggest that being young properly requires a particular body, lifestyle or purchasing power. These are analytical possibilities to investigate in actual material, rather than claims that every advert or programme follows the same pattern.

A contrasting case is Channel 4's Big Boys. Its May 2022 synopsis presents 19-year-old Jack and 25-year-old Danny negotiating friendship, masculinity, grief, sexuality and mental health at university. Danny comes from a run-down seaside town; the characters differ even within a narrow age range. The commissioning announcement identifies Jack Rooke as creator, writer and narrator, drawing on his own earlier experiences. Channel 4 synopsis, commissioning announcement.

This example shows that a more varied representation exists: young men can be emotionally vulnerable and supportive rather than interchangeable threats. It does not establish how common such portrayals are, and a broadcaster's promotional synopsis is evidence about the programme's intended content rather than an independent evaluation. Nor can comparing a 2006 news study with a 2022 comedy prove that news representation improved. The genre, population and method have changed as well as the date.

Class, gender and ethnicity can affect which version of youth is constructed. For example, an original comparison might place a young affluent entrepreneur in a business interview while presenting a working-class teenager through a report about neighbourhood disorder. The issue is not merely whether both are young, but which setting gives them expertise and which invites suspicion. To demonstrate a systematic pattern, researchers would need a defined sample and comparable coding rather than one selected pair.

Older people: portrayal and audience views

Older people can be overlooked or reduced to a limited set of roles even when they appear sympathetically.

Representations of older age may associate it with dependency, confusion, loneliness or decline. Other portrayals emphasise wisdom, experience and authority. None of these qualities is impossible, but turning one into the essence of older age excludes variation. A “wise grandparent” may be warmly portrayed while having little existence beyond supporting relatives. An image of an energetic, wealthy retiree can challenge frailty while implying that a worthwhile later life requires unusual fitness or money.

Audience research helps distinguish an analyst's interpretation from how people themselves read these images. The ASA's 2025 research found that 35% of UK respondents agreed that older people tend to be negatively stereotyped in advertising, while 44% considered them underrepresented or absent. These are survey opinions about advertising, not percentages of advertisements containing stereotypes. ASA, research announcement, 19 June 2025.

The underlying study used qualitative discussions/interviews with 60 participants and a weighted online survey of 4,306 UK people aged 16+. Fieldwork ran from November 2024 to January 2025; “older” meant 55+. Its qualitative findings included objections from some lower socioeconomic participants to portrayals that equated later life with wealth. These findings illuminate meanings and variation; online recruitment, question wording and selected advertising stimuli still matter when evaluating the evidence. ASA/Jigsaw, full report.

For television, Kantar's research for Ofcom involved 312 people across the UK through workshops, discussions and interviews in May–June 2018. Participants described older women as restricted to a few roles and often supporting rather than leading characters, with stronger expectations of youthful appearance than for men. These are qualitative audience perceptions, not a representative count of programmes or a claim that every participant agreed. Kantar/Ofcom, 2018, methods and section 5.