"Exceptions to the rule" Social representations of ageing in the Italian contemporary context

Ageing is shaped in common sense as decline, although the wide demographic and socio-political changes implemented in the last decades contributed to generate more varied and less oppressive views. The present study aims to inquire the social representations of ageing in young, adult and elderly people in an Italian contemporary context, via episodic interviews with women and men. The corpus has been submitted to a hierarchical descendent analysis, using the software IRaMuTeQ. The results show the presence of counter-narratives, mainly among the elderly, less among the adults. Many participants account for episodes in everyday life linked with ageing well; however, negative viewpoints attributed to the Others, with the idea of ageing as a problem, hinders a complete transformation of the representation.