Fraboni Scale of Ageism

The FSA divides ageism into antilocution, avoidance, and discrimination, following Allport's components of prejudice. Antilocution is the verbal expression of negative stereotypes about older people; avoidance is the desire to keep social distance and to limit contact with them; and discrimination is endorsement of treating older people differently or restrictively. Items are assigned to these factors, and subscale scores show which component is most prominent. This structure embodies the scale's central claim that ageism, like other prejudices, is more than a set of mistaken beliefs and includes affective and behavioural dispositions.

They measure opposite directions of attitude. The FSA measures prejudice toward older people as an out-group, capturing stereotyping, avoidance, and discrimination held by the respondent about the old. The Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire measures older respondents' attitudes toward their own ageing across loss, physical change, and growth. The FSA is a measure of ageism aimed at others; the AAQ is a measure of self-perception of ageing. Studies of internalized ageism sometimes use both, but they answer different questions and should not be substituted for one another.

Yes. Like all explicit self-report attitude scales, the FSA can be influenced by respondents' wish to appear unprejudiced, and this is increasingly relevant as openly ageist statements become less socially acceptable. This can compress scores and understate true prejudice, particularly for the more overt items. Researchers mitigate this by careful item wording, anonymous administration, attention to subtler items, and sometimes by complementing the scale with implicit measures or behavioural indicators. Interpreting FSA scores therefore benefits from awareness of the context in which they were collected.