Virtual Issue Editorial Butler’s three constructs of ageism in Australasian Journal on Ageing Sue Malta National Ageing Research Institute; and School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Colleen Doyle National Ageing Research Institute; and Australian Catholic Univer- sity and Villa Maria Catholic Homes, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia In much of the Western world, old age is viewed negatively [1], and ageing is regarded as a process of unavoidable and predictable ‘decline and deterioration’ [2]. The term ‘age- ism’ was initially proposed by Robert Butler, the founding director of the National Institute on Aging in the United States of America (USA) [3]. Ageism is typically expressed as discrimination against people on the basis of their age [4] and is manifested through negative stereotypes and per- ceptions about older adults [5] and, unfortunately, is a fact of life for many older Australians [6]. Butler identified three distinct but related aspects of ageism: attitudes and beliefs, behavioural discrimination, and for- malised policies and practices [7]. In essence, attitudes deter- mine behaviour, which then influence policy development and implementation, which, in turn, influence practice. Stud- ies from gerontology, psychology, communication and soci- ology have subsequently expanded on Butler’s views and have established that ageism is universal [8,9,10]. Ageism is typically exhibited in the language we use to talk to and about older adults, in how they are portrayed in media repre- sentations (both online and offline), through employment practices and health-care policies (or the lack thereof), as well as in the attitudes and behaviour of health professionals [8]. For this virtual issue, we selected papers published in the Australasian Journal on Ageing (AJA) from 1982 to the present day that illustrate Butler’s three constructs of age- ism, as highlighted above. In particular, we looked at com- munity and health professionals’ attitudes to ageing, age discrimination and work, as well as ageism and policy. We excluded book reviews, abstracts, most articles describing non-Australian samples and, with two exceptions, editori- als. A total of 25 papers were selected for this virtual issue. The numbers of papers illustrating each construct are high- lighted in Table 1. Attitudes and beliefs: Community attitudes to ageing Of the seven papers in this theme, three are commentaries or ‘viewpoint’ articles, three are accounts of original research and one provides a brief editorial report of how ageing is regarded in eight different countries. The articles spanned a range of years, with five written in the 1980s, highlighting the emergence of the topic in Australia. In the 1984 editorial [11], eight member nations of the Inter- national Federation on Ageing provided brief reports on public attitudes to older people. The growing awareness of structural ageing and the accompanying alarmist rhetoric, the ‘burden’ of care – as fuelled by the Thatcher administra- tion in the UK – saw a shift in public sentiment from positive to negative towards older people across many countries. The three viewpoint articles reflected this negativity [12,13,14] depicting Australia as a country which hindered ‘successful’ ageing [12] by promulgation of ageist myths and the delete- rious labelling of older people as ‘aged’ or ‘frail aged’. In the earliest research article in this sample, Hall et al. [15] looked at the ageist view that posited older people as asexual beings and reported the results of one of the first Australian studies into later life sexuality. In a community sample of 100 senior citizens in Brisbane, the authors rein- forced previous research which showed the importance of sexual expression appeared to decline with age. However, as social expectations appeared to limit the number of responses to the sexual questions contained in the survey, Correspondence to: Dr Sue Malta, National Ageing Research Insti- tute. Email: s.malta@nari.unimelb.edu.au This article accompanies the third in a series of special virtual issues of the Australasian Journal on Ageing (AJA). It provides a commen- tary on a collection of papers published in the AJA from 1982 to 2016 on the theme of ageism. The theme complements the 2016 Hot Topic ‘Intergenerational Issues’ of the Australian Association of Gerontology, a partner organisation of AJA. [Correction added on 9 January 2017, after first online publication: The title of this article has been amended.] Table 1: Numbers of papers illustrating individual ageism constructs Ageism constructs Numbers of papers/ construct (n = 25) Attitudes and beliefs Community attitudes to ageing 7 Health professionals’ attitudes to ageing 8 Behavioural discrimination Age discrimination and work 6 Formalised policies and practices Ageism and policy 4 Australasian Journal on Ageing, Vol 35 No 4 December 2016, 232–235 © 2016 AJA Inc. DOI: 10.1111/ajag.12363 232