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Older people, well-being and participation: learning resources based on collaborative research
- Authors:
- BARNES Marian, GAHAGAN Beatrice, WARD Lizzie
- Publishers:
- University of Brighton, Age UK Brighton & Hove
- Publication year:
- 2013
- Pagination:
- 24
- Place of publication:
- Brighton
The handbook accompanies films made as part of an ESRC funded participatory research project on well-being in older age. The research was carried out by a team of older people, university researchers and a voluntary sector manager. The handbook provides detailed explanations of the issues explored through the acted scenarios. It also lists questions that can used to reflect more on these issues, and suggests where you can go for more information. (Edited publisher abstract)
Being well enough in old age
- Authors:
- BARNES Marian, TAYLOR David, WARD Lizzie
- Journal article citation:
- Critical Social Policy, 33(3), 2013, pp.473-493.
- Publisher:
- Sage
This article offers a critique of the dominant ways in which well-being has been conceptualized and researched within social policy, focusing in particular on the significance of this for policy relating to older people. It conceptualizes well-being as relational and generative rather than an individual outcome. Normative notions of independence, autonomy and consumerism at the heart of policy on well-being and ageing are critically explored and it is suggested that indexes of older people’s happiness conceal more than they reveal. This theoretical approach is illustrated with empirical material from a participatory study in which older people were co-producers of knowledge about what well-being means and how it can be produced. Working with older people as co-researchers it was found that keeping well in old age involves demanding emotional and organizational labour both for older people and for family and friends. The need for ethical and relational sensibilities at the heart of policy on well-being and ageing is suggested. (Edited publisher abstract)
Well-being in old age: findings from participatory research
- Authors:
- WARD Lizzie, BARNES Marian, GAHAGAN Beatrice
- Publisher:
- University of Brighton; Age Concern Brighton, Hove and Portslade
- Publication year:
- 2012
- Pagination:
- 88p.
- Place of publication:
- Brighton
This project was designed to develop understanding of what well-being means to older people, and of how it is produced. A major aim of the project was to make a contribution to thinking about policy and practice and how this might enhance or detract from the way people experience well-being in old age. Eleven co-researchers, aged between 60 and 87, were recruited between 2008 and 2011. The co-researchers carried out one to one interviews with 30 older people and seven focus groups in which another 59 older people took part. Findings revealed that relationships were significant. Families could be a source of support and security, but for some can also involve difficult and painful relationships, distance and estrangement. Good relationships with adult children can contribute to well-being and maintaining satisfactory relationships was recognised as important. Health also featured as an important factor in well-being; chronic ill health had not only physical effects, but also emotional and psychological impacts. However, Being able to draw on experiences gained over a lifetime, learning from past mistakes, or reflecting on the benefit of hindsight, informed present attitudes and was a personal resource for some.
‘Paying our own way’: application of the capability approach to explore older people’s experiences of self-funding social care
- Authors:
- TANNER Denise, WARD Lizzie, RAY Mo
- Journal article citation:
- Critical Social Policy, 38(2), 2018, pp.262-282.
- Publisher:
- Sage
Adult social care policy in England is premised on the concept of personalisation that purports to place individuals in control of the services they receive through market-based mechanisms of support, such as direct payments and personal budgets. However, the demographic context of an ageing population and the economic and political context of austerity have endorsed further rationing of resources. Increasing numbers of people now pay for their own social care because either they do not meet tight eligibility criteria for access to services and/or their financial means place them above the threshold for local authority-funded care. The majority of self-funders are older people. Older people with complex and changing needs are particularly likely to experience difficulties in fulfilling the role of informed, proactive and skilled navigators of the care market. Based on individual interviews with older people funding their own care, this article uses a relational-political interpretation (Deneulin, 2011) of the capability approach (CA) to analyse shortfalls between the policy rhetoric of choice and control and the lived experience of self-funding. Whilst CA, like personalisation, is seen as reflecting neo-liberal values, we argue that, in its relational-political form, it has the potential to expose the fallacious assumptions on which self-funding policies are founded and to offer a more nuanced understanding of older people’s experiences. (Edited publisher abstract)
Negotiating well-being: older people's narratives of relationships and relationality
- Author:
- WARD Lizzie
- Journal article citation:
- Ethics and Social Welfare, 8(3), 2014, pp.293-305.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
- Place of publication:
- Abingdon
This article discusses well-being in old age by drawing on findings from participatory research carried out by older co-researchers exploring how older people learn to sustain their own and others’ well-being. For the research, interviews were carried out with 30 people aged 67 to 97 and a further 59 people took part in focus groups. The article considers the way in which research based in older people's experience can inform ethical policy and practice capable of delivering well-being. It critiques individualized notions of well-being and provides a counter-perspective based in relational understandings of what it is to be human drawn from feminist care ethics. This offers a different way of understanding the significance of social relationships and networks to older people's well-being from that offered by a focus on ‘community’ which has emerged in the communitarian discourses of the UK Coalition government. It illustrates this with older people's accounts of well-being highlighting the ways in which relationships with people, places and spaces are negotiated with ageing. Finally it argues that this relational conceptualization of well-being embodies values and the ethical dimensions of responsibility based in lived experiences. This provides the basis for alternative values-based policies and practices which we need to distinguish from the instrumental expression of social relationships and ‘community’ within communitarian discourses. (Edited publisher abstract)