A comparison of communication responses of professional helpers to elderly and other adult clients

Abstract

Statement of the Problem. A large, predominantly survey, literature purports to show that adults, including professional helpers, hold stereotypical and generally negative views toward the elderly as a group. By contrast, empirical work which focuses on adults' impressions of specific elderly people, and a small body of work comparing professional helpers' responses to elderly as opposed to other adult clients, indicate that the suggested negative attitudes toward the elderly may not translate into systematic discrimination against the elderly by professional helpers. Therefore, this study investigated whether the age of the client would make any differences in the specific communication responses of a sample of professional helpers to elderly and other adult clients.

Procedures. The subjects were 48 social workers with MSW degrees. They examined six case excerpts (and accompanying client photographs) of a problematic expression by young adult, middle-aged, and elderly clients. Client age and order of cases were systematically varied in a Latin Square design. The subjects did checklist ratings of their impressions of the clients and then wrote responses, in a helper's role, to each client statement. Finally they rated the helpfulness of standard helper responses to each statement. Written responses and ratings of helper responses were assessed on scales for empathic communication and empathic understanding, respectively.

Three sets of dependent variables--checklist ratings, written responses, and ratings of helper responses--were analyzed in a 2 x 3 mixed model analysis of variance. The within-groups factor was the age of the client, while the between-groups factor was whether or not the subject had work experience with the elderly.

Findings. The subjects' ratings of helper responses were consistent with the order of preference of expert judges. The mean empathy-scale levels for their written responses to each age-group, however, were below the scale's level of minimal helpfulness. More important to this study, the client's age had no significant effects on either the empathic level of the subjects' written responses or on their ratings of the helper responses. Moreover, these results occurred despite the subjects having significantly different impressions of elderly clients on several personality traits. They rated elderly clients more positively on six of sixteen personality traits, viewing them as less selfish, feeling better about themselves, more active, more interesting, more experienced, and wiser. They also stereotypically perceived the elderly on five of six age-related concerns, i.e., as more concerned with health, dying, physical safety, and money, and as less concerned with male companionship.

The subjects' work experience with the elderly also had no significant effects on any of the dependent measures. Experienced subjects, however, were more empathic at a marginally significant level in their written responses to all clients than were non-experienced subjects.

Conclusions. The findings suggest that when client behaviors are held constant across age-groups no effects occur from client age alone on the specific helping responses of professional helpers. While age by itself may not be a critical factor in determining response, it may be profitable in further research to investigate whether combining age with certain behaviors such as expressions of irritableness and chronic grief and hopelessness produce age-by-behavior interaction effects upon professional responses. A second area for further research flows out of the results concerning the subjects' low empathy scores in their written responses to clients. This suggests the importance of research into the efficacy of current well-developed empathic training technologies and of empathic training programs in both the preparation and the continuing education of professional helpers for professional practice.