When reporter Ina Jaffe started covering aging for National Public Radio, she quickly learned how sensitive older people are about how they are referred to in the media.  This prompted NPR to do a survey to find out what older adults want to be called.

Well, it’s certainly not “senior citizen.”  Only about 12 percent of those responding considered the term acceptable.

The key finding of the survey is that there is not much enthusiasm for any of the terms commonly used.  The winning term — with an anemic 43 percent of the votes — was the plain and simple “older adult.”  The terms “elder” and just “senior” (without the “citizen”) each got a pass from about a third of respondents.

In her NPR report on the survey, Jaffe noted: “The category of dislikes had the most enthusiasm. There were about three and a half times more votes cast for terms that didn’t like than for terms that they liked. And I can sum up the overall response by saying that they disliked pretty much everything.”

And that’s exactly what Ronni Bennett, who refers to herself as an “elderblogger,” found in a survey she did in May.  People are clear about what they DON’T like but are less definite about what they do like. See Bennett’s post for a list of what’s acceptable and what is despised.  The results are similar to NPR’s.

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