**4. Discussion**

Considering the results of the correlational analysis, as expected given prior studies [20,21], individuals who reported more age-related discrimination and age-related meta-stereotypes expressed lower life satisfaction. Moreover, respondents who were more emotionally engaged with their jobs were more likely to express greater life satisfaction. None of the other correlations reached significance. Almost all correlations were small, suggesting that these variables probably play a small role in accounting for life satisfaction. The rather low, but significant, correlation between age-related discrimination and life satisfaction seems surprising given that the work environment tends to be a major part of life, and experiencing discrimination would seem to be associated with life satisfaction to a higher degree. This result can perhaps be explained by the lower variability of the work-discrimination variable. An examination of the frequency distribution suggests our sample reported experiencing rather low levels of discrimination. The scores ranged between 23 and 103, and 23 was the model score with 25.86% (*n* = 30 out of 116) of the participants responding 1 = Never experiencing any discrimination on any of the items; another 26 (22% reported two scores of 24–29), and only 19 respondents reported total scores of 70–103 and above (corresponding to the average rating between Sometimes (3) and Very Often (5)). It is possible that the occurrence of age-related discrimination may be low in this research setting. However, despite guarantees of the anonymity of responses, it is possible that many respondents were not fully open because of the fear that their responses on such sensitive matters can be tracked online.

Given the significant correlations among the subscales of the included job-related variables, the decision was made to conduct a factor analysis to reduce the number of variables for multiple regression analysis to predict life satisfaction. The factor analysis revealed three factors: Job Engagement (combination of physical, emotional, and cognitive), Experiencing Ageism (combination of age discrimination and stereotypes), and Work Climate (combination of intergenerational affect and inclusiveness). When factor-based correlations for the three factors were correlated with life satisfaction, ageism was the only variable that correlated significantly. The result that climate and job engagemen<sup>t</sup> were not predictive of life satisfaction was contrary to our expectation based on earlier studies [21,31,34–36]. Furthermore, when life satisfaction was regressed on demographic variables, *R<sup>2</sup>* was not significant, but when the three factors were added in the second step, the change in *R<sup>2</sup>* reached marginal significance. Additionally, controlling for other factors,

ageism was the only significant predictor of life satisfaction. The results taken together sugges<sup>t</sup> the relatively greater importance of ageism in the prediction of life satisfaction compared with job engagemen<sup>t</sup> and work intergenerational affect and inclusiveness climate. These results are supportive of the results of Yao et al. [27], Redman and Snape [28], and others, but they also add to the previous work that suggests ageism may play a more primary role than job engagemen<sup>t</sup> and work climate-related variables. The rather high and significant correlation (*r* = −0.649) between ageism and climate suggests that these factors may go hand in hand, but job engagemen<sup>t</sup> may stay independent of both ageism and climate, perhaps because of the high social desirability of the job engagemen<sup>t</sup> construct that resulted in a negatively skewed distribution even on the combined variable based on factor analysis.
