(Państwowa Szkoła Wyższa im. Papieża Jana Pawła II w Białej Podlaskiej, 2019-07-23)
Witczyńska, Ewa
Since the 1960s the popular culture discourse has set firm boundaries between age groups in the society. The
domination of youth, disseminated by the mass media, has taken root in the western culture and the elderly have found
themselves marginalised. As a result, the communication between the young and the old has been limited and the mutual
perception of each other has become more and more negatively stereotypical, according to many researchers.
This paper attempts to find out to what extent the aforementioned attitudes impinge on the consciousness of Polish young adults
and in what terms they describe their relations with the elderly. In order to answer these questions, a writing task, describing
an imaginary situation involving both the young and the old, was performed by a group of college students in Sandomierz
aged 20-23. The compositions were analysed in search of age stereotypes, social role perceptions and communication modes
between generations.