The role of social cognitions in influencing intergenerational communication has been previously demonstrated. For instance, it is now accepted that particular negative stereotypes of older adults may lead to the use of patronizing speech to those individuals. The proposed research aims to study a particular realm of social cognition that has not been examined -- schemas relating specifically to intergenerational interactions. It is argued that cognitive representations of conversations may be more influential than representations of people in determining the successful enactment of intergenerational communication. Two studies are proposed. In the first study, 40 older adult and 40 younger adult participants will be interviewed regarding their thoughts about intergenerational conversations. They will be asked to provide accounts of intergenerational conversations with different types of partner, and will be probed for details regarding the affective experience, content, and process of such encounters. The interviews will be coded by investigators to derive common """"""""types"""""""" of intergenerational conversations. These types will then be coded for their relative level of elaboration and accessibility, and for complementarity between younger and older adults' types. In the second study, younger and older adults will perform a sorting task on short exemplars of these types. This task will provide data for cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. These analyses will provide validation for the conversation types emerging from the first study. In addition, the analyses will uncover the cognitive organization of the types, both in terms of their hierarchical structure and underlying dimensions. Stable types emerging from the two studies would be termed Intergenerational Communication Schemas (ICS's). The proposed studies will provide the grounding for an extensive program of experimental research examining the role of ICS's in influencing intergenerational conversations.
