Are Granfluencers breaking age stereotypes? An analysis of senior influencers on Instagram

Master‘s Thesis from the year 2022 in the subject Sociology - Old Age, grade: 1,7, University of Applied Sciences Ansbach, language: English, abstract: The focus of this work is hereby on the images that influencers above the age of 60 (in the following also called as ¿older¿ or ¿elderly¿ as well as ¿older generations¿) share on social media in both private and professional contexts. The aim here is to find out whether Granfluencers eliminate existing age stereotypes or reinforce them. The knowledge gained from this research can serve as a foundation for digital marketing strategies in cooperations that would like to diversify their campaigns in the future. In order to be able to answer this question, the current state of research was presented in the second chapter. In this section, stereotypes, especially age stereotypes, gender stereotypes, gendered ageism, and the portrayal of older people in the media were discussed. In this context, gender and age studies were also discussed, followed by a closer look at Granfluencers. These were first defined, then the origins of these were described, and in the last step, the importance of Granfluencers for digital marketing was discussed.The third chapter deals with the actual analysis, which was executed to look at the expression of age and gender stereotypes of Granfluencers in detail. For this purpose, the aim of the analysis, the research questions, and the methodological implementation were first presented. In a second step, the object of investigation was defined in detail based on the theory of content analysis by Rössler. Afterwards, validity and reliability were defined and documented in the context of the master thesis. The third section deals with the presentation of the results and lastly the results were evaluated in this chapter. The conclusion summarizes the thesis and mentions the limitations as well as the implications for future research.