An FSU College of Social Sciences and Public Policy (COSSPP) research team was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation for the project “Pro-Tech Ageism? Analysis of U.S. Aging Policy’s Depiction of Technology.”
Anne Barrett, Ph.D., Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar Chair of Gerontology and Professor of Sociology at FSU, serves as the project’s Principal Investigator (PI), working with Hope Mimbs and Brianna Soulie, two graduate students in the Department of Sociology.
This grant is funded by the Borchard Center on Law and Aging, a program of the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation. The center offers funding for academic research grants, fellowships, and other efforts that aim to enhance the quality of life of older adults.
The award to Barrett and her collaborators will support research that examines how older people’s devalued status may heighten their risk of exploitation by unbridled technological promotion, which is viewed as a cost-effective response to population aging.
“We’re excited to take ageism research in a new direction. Most of the research has focused on individuals’ experiences of ageism, so we know relatively little about how it operates at structural levels,” Dr. Barrett said. “We are also excited by our project’s focus on technology, which will allow us to address questions that are increasingly relevant to the world’s aging populations.”
The project seeks to be the first to examine depictions of technology in U.S. aging policies. It will determine which technologies are promoted, how they are rationalized, and how they may benefit various stakeholders – older adults, caregivers, the state, and the technology and aging industries.
Dr. Barrett is also a Faculty Associate with FSU’s Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy and is an award-winning teacher and researcher. Recent awards for her research on ageism include the 2024 American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course’s Outstanding Publication Award and the 2024 Gerontological Society of America Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Article Award. She is also the recipient of the 2022 J. Michael Armer Faculty Teaching Award and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award (Italy, 2018-2019).
The project involves the analysis of policy documents from entities that are key players in shaping U.S. aging policies. It will examine various materials, such as policy summaries, strategic reports, and press releases, that focus on technology and aging issues and were published in the past 25 years.
This timeframe, which corresponds with explosive growth in digital technologies, permits consideration of how their framing, underlying values, and ideologies may have changed as innovations expanded.
For more information about COSSPP’s research initiatives and grants, visit coss.fsu.edu/research. For more about FSU’s Department of Sociology, visit coss.fsu.edu/sociology.