Attitudes to age are multidimensional. Previous research has suggested that people can hold seemingly contradictory views on older people, attributing both positive and negative attributes to them. In order to further explore these issues we used data from the 6th wave of the World Values Survey. This covered over 90,000 respondents from 60 countries worldwide. Respondents were asked to rate a number of statements about older people, e.g. older people are a burden on society. We performed a cluster analyses based on these statements to see whether we could identify groups of people who shared similar ideas about older people. The results revealed 4 clusters: age-neutral (9.9%), age-injustice (69.7%), age-positive (3.7%) and age-negative (16.6%). However, the distribution of these clusters varies widely cross-national differences, e.g. the age-positive cluster ranges from 0% in Chile to 19% in Rwanda. The results suggest there are various global cultures of ageing.
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