Scholarly attention to the psychosocial dimensions of elderly care organizations has increased in recent years (e.g., Esmaeilzadeh & Oz, 2020; Kossek et al., 2019). Research addressing the meanings attributed to work and old age among personnel in such services is part of this broader interest and has a clear rationale. Studies on street-level bureaucrats—employees in public services who implement policies and programs at the operational level—show that workers who engage directly with service users play a decisive role in shaping how policies are enacted. The implementation of strategies, programs, and routines is largely contingent upon the practices of these frontline employees (Lipsky, 2010; Maupin, 1993). The transition from policy formulation to implementation is complex, with local culture and power relations as influential as the resources and technical knowledge (Ellis, 2015). Within it, meanings emerge as mediators of workers’ relationship with their professional roles (Engeström, 2014). Focusing on the meaning of working with older adults offers valuable insights into how concepts such as care and old age are constructed and transformed over time. The aim of this study is to examine how the meanings of work and old age are semantically related in the representations of frontline workers in elderly care, revealing the symbolic structures that connect professional identity with perceptions of aging.

Literature on Images of Old Age (IOA) within elderly-related services is focused on stereotypes (e.g., Bustillos-López & Fernández-Ballesteros, 2012; Franco et al., 2010; Hadjistavropoulos et al., 2000; Sarabia Cobo & Castanedo Pfeiffer, 2015). The Stereotype Content Model (Cuddy et al., 2005; Operario & Fiske, 2003) remains the most influential framework, synthesizing IOA along warmth and competence with older adults typically perceived as high in warmth but low in competence. Erdman Palmore (1999) identified nine recurrent traits shaping stereotypical representations of old age: ailment, cognitive impairment, depression, sickness, lack of mental health, ugliness, impotence, uselessness, and poverty. Subsequent research expanded this characterization to include dependency (Adams-Price & Morse, 2009; Angus & Reeve, 2006), childishness, nuisance, and idleness (Ansello, 1978), and disinterest (Romanov, 2014).

IOA are not confined to broad stereotypes. Stereotypes can also be examined as context-bound constructs, since different traits acquire relevance in different settings and social groups (Kornadt et al., 2016; Kornadt & Rothermund, 2011). Research conceptualizing IOA as context-dependent aims to emphasize the heterogeneity of representations surrounding old age. Studies on an activist group of older women in Canada illustrate how age-related meanings are redefined through collective action (Narushima, 2004; Sawchuk, 2009).

Barely examined regarding elderly-related services, the Meaning of Work (MoW) has been defined and studied through multiple conceptual lenses (Rosso et al., 2010), like the distinctions between instrumentality and expressivity (Morse & Weiss, 1955); values (Lyman, 1955); centrality and social norms (MoW International Research Team, 1987); meaningfulness (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003); and meanings as a life domain (Wrzesniewski et al., 2003). No single dimension can be privileged without reference to the specific context and research interests. Thus, MoW may be broadly defined as the dynamic ways individuals think and speak about, experience, and value their work life. Like IOA, these meaning structures form part of a semantic network through which individuals construct and relate to work experiences.

Research within elderly-related services that explicitly addresses meaning has focused on distinct objects, such as the service provided, withdrawal from care, job satisfaction, and professional competence. Deborah Kinnear et al. (2014) explored the meaning of dignified care among NHS professionals, defined as treating elders as individuals, ensuring their safety. Similarly, Anne Liveng (2012) described an “empathy at distance” in Danish elderly care employees, reflecting both anxiety toward the elders and a strong motivation for caregiving.

Turnover and nursing practice have also been analyzed in terms of meaning. A review by Margriet van Iersel et al. (2016) showed that nursing students perceive elderly care as an unattractive career path. Karin Blomberg et al. (2013) linked turnover among nurses to beliefs about older adults and feelings of limited influence over care delivery. Ayala Ben-Arie and Esther Iecovich (2014) similarly reported that working with elders with low functional status and cognitive impairment leads to stress and low job satisfaction among home care workers.

Other studies have addressed decision-making and professional competence. Campbell Killick and Brian Taylor (2009) found that elderly care professionals face moral dilemmas when dealing with abuse cases, requiring them to navigate ambiguity. Finally, Michael Kane et al. (2004) examined perceived adequacy among clinical social workers, showing that attitudes toward working with individuals with Alzheimer’s disease were the strongest predictor of self-assessed competence.

Meaning-making processes among professionals in elderly care have also been studied. Maria Wassermann et al. (2014) found that nurses’ capacity for meaning-making mediates the effects of working conditions on emotional exhaustion and vigor. Negotiating meaning also functions as a means of sustaining a positive professional identity. Annette Kamp and Pernille Bottrup (2009) identified four dimensions of meaning among home care assistants: being professional, being observant, acting as a nurse, and acting as a social care worker. Likewise, Elisabeth Häggström et al. (2005) observed a shift from dissatisfaction to satisfaction among Swedish nurses, facilitated by education, supervision, and open communication.

Broader frameworks have also emphasized the symbolic and relational dimensions of care. Catherine Buckley et al. (2014) proposed narrative practice as a means of understanding how professionals construct and sustain meaning in their work. Niklas Wällstedt (2017) underscored client focus as central to fostering professional values, while Belinda Dewar and Mike Nolan (2013), drawing on David Coghlan’s (2000) appreciative inquiry, advanced a relation-centered model of elderly care.

Gender and place of origin are also recognized as key factors shaping the meaning of elderly care. As Ester Gallo and Francesca Scrinzi (2016) observe, the increasing participation of male immigrant workers in care-giving often entails a distant, professional stance and a tendency to avoid “dirty work.” A survey-based study conducted by Adriana Ortega et al. (2010) found that Danish and Western immigrant workers reported higher levels of well-being at work than their non-Western counterparts. In contexts lacking such labor participation, the burden of care frequently falls on unpaid family women caregivers (Naldini et al., 2016).

Existing research tends to examine the Meaning of Work (MoW) and the Images of Old Age (IOA) as separate domains. Studies addressing IOA have primarily focused on stereotypes or context-specific representations of aging, while research on MoW has explored individual and organizational factors shaping work motivation, identity, and satisfaction. However, little is known about how these two dimensions intersect in the lived experience of frontline workers. This intersection is critical, as the meanings workers attribute to their activities and to the older adults they serve mediate both their engagement and the quality of care provided. The study aims to identify and interpret the underlying semantic structures linking the meanings of work and old age, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of how care professionals construct symbolic relations between their occupational roles and the populations they serve.

The present study proposes an integrative framework connecting the Meaning of Work (MoW) and the Images of Old Age (IOA) through the lens of semantic networks. Both constructs are understood as interrelated representational systems that structure professionals’ symbolic relationship with their work and with the older adults they serve. MoW encompasses the meanings, values, and emotional investments that define how individuals relate to their occupational activity, whereas IOA refers to the representations through which aging and older persons are perceived. Their intersection forms a shared semantic field, in which the meanings of care, dependency, autonomy, or dignity emerge as key nodes articulating moral and emotional dimensions of caregiving. The link between MoW and IOA is grounded in the configuration of semantic associations that jointly define how professionals construct both their own work identity and their perception of old age.

This conceptual articulation draws upon the theory of social representations, particularly the structural approach (Abric, 1994; Vergès, 1992), which provides a framework for analyzing collective meaning as a network of interconnected elements organized around a central core and peripheral zones. Meanings are conceived as associative structures, where the strength and pattern of connections reveal the organization of collective thought. The analytical process operationalizes this perspective by grouping open descriptors according to semantic similarity, allowing the emergence of categories that represent shared conceptual nuclei. The principle of adjacency is then applied to detect co-occurrence patterns among these categories in participants’ discourse, revealing how notions related to work and aging are semantically connected. Applying correspondence analysis to the resulting adjacency matrix enables a geometric representation of the semantic network: distances reflect degrees of association, and axes capture the latent dimensions structuring the representational field.

In this sense, semantic networks provide the connective tissue between MoW and IOA, enabling the integration of both domains into a single representational space. The resulting model illustrates how the symbolic constructions of work and aging are jointly structured through patterns of proximity and opposition—such as instrumental versus vocational meanings of work or positive versus deficit-based images of old age. By articulating these domains within a unified semantic network, the framework expands the structural approach to social representations, demonstrating how the meanings of work and of aging are co-constructed within the same symbolic system.

This exploratory study combined qualitative and quantitative procedures to examine the semantic relationships between the Meaning of Work (MoW) and the Images of Old Age (IOA) among professionals working with older adults. The design was primarily grounded in the Natural Semantic Networks (NSN) model (Figueroa et al., 1976), which conceptualizes meaning as a system of interconnected associative elements. The study also drew theoretical inspiration from the structural approach to social representations (Abric, 1994; Vergès, 1992), particularly regarding the organization of central and peripheral elements within shared symbolic systems. Open associative descriptors capture participants’ spontaneous verbal associations (Abric, 2001b), producing a corpus of expressions that reflect the semantic field of collective meanings surrounding work and old age. This approach allows participants to freely select words or short phrases they consider most representative, generating empirical data that are both qualitatively rich and statistically analyzable.

Correspondence analysis (CA) was selected to model the structural relationships among categories derived from these descriptors. CA offers a geometric representation of co-occurrence patterns in contingency tables, facilitating the visualization of semantic proximities and oppositions between MoW and IOA categories (see García Santesmases, 1984; Greenacre, 2007). This integration of Natural Semantic Networks and multivariate modeling makes it possible to examine the underlying semantic architecture that connects meanings of work and aging among frontline professionals within a shared representational field.

The analytical procedures described above provided a structured framework for exploring how the meanings of work and old age are semantically interconnected in the discourse of frontline workers. The quantitative results on participants’ self-perceptions of well-being, engagement, and Meaning of Work (MoW) established a psychological and organizational context for framing the subsequent semantic analyses. Through the sequential application of semantic grouping, adjacency mapping, and correspondence analysis, it was possible to model the representational field emerging from participants’ open descriptors. The resulting factorial map captures the latent dimensions organizing the co-occurrence of MoW and Images of Old Age (IOA) categories, offering a geometric visualization of their relationships. These findings are described below, beginning with the overall structure of the semantic space and then turning to the framing of the main factorial axes that define the intersection between representations of work and aging.

The core objective of this study was to identify the semantic structures linking the Meaning of Work (MoW) and the Images of Old Age (IOA) among personnel in elderly-related services. Although quantitative measures of well-being and engagement provided contextual background, the most substantive insights emerged from the analysis of open descriptors, which offered a window into how workers linguistically construct their occupational identities and their views of older adults.

MoW descriptors with the highest frequencies—responsibility, satisfaction, love, commitment—reflect a strong tendency to conceptualize care work through psychological, ethical, and affective meanings. This aligns with prior research showing that workers frequently frame their roles through narratives of purpose, emotional engagement, and professional identity (Häggström et al., 2005; Kamp, 2012; Kamp & Bottrup, 2009). IOA descriptors likewise revealed a dual structure: experience, wisdom, love, and tenderness attest to positive, relational images, while terms such as sickness and loneliness reflect well-documented perceptions of decline. This ambivalence is consistent with the Stereotype Content Model (Cuddy et al., 2005) and with Palmore’s (1999) longstanding observation that positive symbolic associations coexist with negative images of frailty, dependency, or illness.

The categorization of descriptors further clarified these patterns. MoW categories with the highest frequencies centered on wellbeing, motivation, and ethical conduct, suggesting an orientation toward morally grounded and emotionally meaningful work. IOA categories were more concentrated, dominated by Experience, wisdom and legacy and Warmth and kindness, two highly salient dimensions also noted in studies where professionals view older adults through relational or moral lenses.

Correspondence Analysis revealed five distinct semantic sectors—Formality, Transactions, Relationships, Compassion, and Results—that capture how MoW and IOA are connected in practice. Importantly, these sectors are not mutually exclusive attitudes but discursive repertoires that workers can draw from to explain or justify their practices. The coexistence of moral/relational sectors (Relationships and Compassion) with performance- or efficiency-oriented sectors (Transactions and Results) reflects similar tensions described in the literature on “empathy at distance” (Liveng, 2012), the rationality of caring (Waerness, 1984), and the organizational ambivalences faced by care workers in restructured systems (Kamp & Bottrup, 2009). Thus, the empirical findings align with and extend prior theoretical work by demonstrating how these tensions appear in the semantic fabric of workers’ language.

This study contributes to the literature by bringing MoW and IOA together within a unified analytic framework—something that previous studies have rarely attempted. Research on IOA has largely focused on stereotypes or context-specific representations (Adams-Price & Morse, 2009; Ansello, 1978; Palmore, 1999; Sarabia Cobo & Castanedo Pfeiffer, 2015), while MoW research has examined work meaning through psychological or sociological dimensions (Morse & Weiss, 1955; MOW International Research Team, 1987; Rosso et al., 2010). The present findings suggest that these domains are mutually constitutive: how workers imagine older adults shapes how they imagine their work, and vice versa.

The five semantic sectors provide a novel conceptualization of this interdependence. Relationships and Compassion echo caring rationalities described by Kari Waerness (1984) and by narrative-practice approaches (Buckley et al., 2014), whereby emotional engagement and moral concern become central organizing principles. Transactions and Results correspond to more technocratic, managerial logics associated with efficiency, performance, and organizational control—similar to the ambivalences identified by Kamp & Bottrup (2009). The coexistence of these sectors thus illustrates how workers navigate—and linguistically reconcile—contradictory expectations embedded in elderly-care institutions.

Furthermore, the corpus-based approach used here complements existing qualitative and quantitative frameworks by demonstrating that semantic associations can reveal meaning structures that are not directly observable through interviews or standardized scales. This methodological contribution echoes calls for more fine-grained, language-centered research on the symbolic dimensions of care work (e.g., Sahagún Padilla et al., 2015).

Several practice-oriented insights follow from these findings. (1) Given the prominence of relational and moral descriptors, interventions should strengthen ethical reflection, emotional support, and interpersonal competencies, consistent with person-centered models of care (Buckley et al., 2014; Dewar & Nolan, 2013). (2) While positive IOA descriptors were more frequent, negative images of dependency, decline, or exclusion also emerged. Training programs should encourage workers to critically reflect on these images and explore more nuanced understandings of aging, consistent with work by Anna Kornadt et al. (2016) and Anna Kornadt & Klaus Rothermund (2011). (3) The tension between caring rationalities and efficiency-oriented expectations—visible in the Transactions and Results sectors—suggests that organizational arrangements should support a balance between quality of interaction and performance requirements. (4) Workers derive meaning not only from tasks but also from interpreting and narrating their work (Häggström et al., 2005; Kamp, 2012). Structured opportunities for reflection can help maintain well-being and reduce the risks associated with emotional strain (Wassermann et al., 2014). (5) Finally, the salience of descriptors related to wisdom, warmth, and individuality underscores the need for care models that recognize older adults as whole persons with histories, preferences, and evolving needs.

As with any corpus-based study, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, the exclusion of low-frequency categories—necessary for statistical clarity—may obscure emergent or marginal representations. These descriptors warrant further qualitative exploration (Wang, 1999). Second, the study was conducted in a medium-sized Mexican city, which may raise questions about generalizability. Nonetheless, examining contexts outside dominant research settings broadens the cultural lens of elderly-care scholarship and contributes to a more globally nuanced understanding of care work. Third, demographic subgroup analyses were not performed because the descriptor—rather than the individual—is the analytic unit in corpus-based semantic approaches; subgroup comparisons would require methodological assumptions incompatible with this framework. Finally, although the data were collected in 2015, this temporal distance does not undermine the relevance of the findings. Research on social representations (Abric, 2001a) consistently shows that the core semantic structures through which people interpret social objects tend to be highly stable over time, with change occurring primarily at the periphery. From this perspective, the five semantic sectors identified in this study—Formality, Transactions, Relationships, Compassion, and Results—should be understood as enduring frames that organize MoW and IOA in a deep, structural manner. While specific descriptors may shift in response to new policies, organizational reforms, or cultural narratives, these sectors provide a robust baseline for interpreting how meanings of work and old age evolve. Rather than limiting the study, the temporal distance highlights the value of these findings as a reference point for future longitudinal or comparative research.

Future research should build on these findings by examining how the semantic structures linking Meaning of Work and Images of Old Age evolve across different organizational, cultural, and policy contexts. The five sectors identified here offer a useful baseline for longitudinal comparisons as elder-care systems undergo demographic, technological, and managerial changes. In addition, exploring how organizational reforms, staffing conditions, or care models (e.g., person-centered care) influence shifts in specific sectors may clarify how workers negotiate institutional pressures and moral commitments over time. Finally, investigating the perspectives of older adults themselves would enable a fuller mapping of the relational and symbolic dynamics that structure contemporary elder care.

This study shows how the meanings that care workers attach to their jobs and the images they hold of older adults are interconnected. By analyzing open descriptors and their co-occurrence structures, we identified semantic patterns that reveal how care professionals draw simultaneously on ethical, relational, organizational, and decline-related frames to understand their everyday work. Mapping these meaning structures enhances our understanding of the symbolic foundations of elder care and offers a basis for developing interventions, training, and organizational practices that align with workers’ lived realities. Attending to the language used in care settings is therefore essential for promoting more humane, effective, and sustainable environments of care.