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Ethical issues when interviewing older people about loneliness: reflections and recommendations for an effective methodological approach
- Ruth Naughton-Doe, Jenny Barke, Helen Manchester, Paul Willis, Andrea Wigfield
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- Journal:
- Ageing & Society , First View
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 September 2022, pp. 1-19
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- Article
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Loneliness among older people is perceived as a global public health concern, although assumptions that old age is a particularly lonely time for everyone are not accurate. While there is accumulating quantitative and qualitative evidence on the experience and impact of loneliness amongst older adults, there is little exploration of methodological issues that arise in engaging with older adults particularly through research-oriented conversations. The sensitivity and stigma often attached to loneliness means that interviewing research participants presents ethical challenges for researchers navigating complex emotional responses. This paper presents reflections from three research projects that used research interviews to explore accounts of loneliness experienced by older people. The everyday methodological decisions of research teams are often hidden from view, but through a critical examination of reflexive accounts of fieldwork, this paper makes visible the internal and external negotiations of researchers responding to ethical complexity. The paper explores the key decisions that researchers make during interviews about loneliness: how to introduce the topic; how to phrase questions about loneliness; when to ask the questions; how to deal with the stigma of loneliness and respond to ageism; and how to manage the participant–researcher relationship post-interview. The paper concludes with recommendations for appropriately navigating ethical complexity in loneliness research, thus contributing to an effective qualitative methodological approach to researching loneliness in later life.
4 - Regulating for ‘care-ful’ knowledge Production: Researching Older People, Isolation and Loneliness
- Edited by Morag McDermont, University of Bristol, Tim Cole, University of Bristol, Janet Newman, Angela Piccini, University of Bristol
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- Book:
- Imagining Regulation Differently
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 29 January 2020, pp 67-84
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Summary
Introduction
Collaborative, co-produced research is positioned as increasingly essential to the university in delivering public good and in finding answers to the increasingly ‘wicked’ problems that we face as social researchers (Facer and Enright, 2016). Important questions need to be asked concerning how far current regulatory norms and practices around research maximise insights and the realisation of transformative change. In the UK at least, despite the prominence of ‘co-production’ in higher education research funding strategies, the balance in research funding remains weighted towards research in which problems and interests are identified from within the academic community. This chapter tells the story of a research project that aimed to develop more equitable and inclusive ‘regulatory systems’ around the production of knowledge concerning the isolation and loneliness of older people. As such, this is a chapter about regulation in, and of, research programmes that is intended to highlight the way in which ‘top-down’ regulation, embedded in university ethical processes, funder requirements and forms of accountability around research, create particular relations between universities and publics. This article draws attention to alternative regulatory systems for knowledge production emerging from our co-produced research process that draw particularly on feminist concerns centred on an ethic of care. We call this ‘care-ful’ research.
In order to explore these alternative regulatory systems, the chapter examines how we ‘care-fully’ co-produced regulatory structures during our research with older people around an increasingly ‘publicly’ discussed issue of the loneliness of older people. Research into isolation and loneliness tends to focus on the psychological and medical causes or consequences of loneliness (Schirmer and Michailakis, 2015). In our work, we wanted to understand how the loneliness of older people is framed and understood across society and, particularly, by older people themselves. In this chapter, we consider how adopting an ethic of care, founded on accounts in feminist thinking (Beasley and Bacchi, 2007; Code, 2015; Bellacasa, 2017; Sörensson and Kalman, 2017), supported us to practically co-create and sustain a particular set of regulatory systems and processes around our research.
ten - Objects of loss: resilience, continuity and learning in material culture relationships
- Edited by Anna Goulding, Newcastle University, Bruce Davenport, Newcastle University, Andrew Newman, Newcastle University
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- Book:
- Resilience and Ageing
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 19 April 2022
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- 19 December 2018, pp 227-248
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Summary
Editorial introduction
This chapter explore resilience as a response to the ordinary experiences of loss in later life: loss of relationships, loss of a home and loss of objects. Objects, or their absence, feature prominently here. Material culture studies looks at the role objects have in supporting human relationships and memories. Creativity is primarily discussed in terms of the everyday processes of curating objects (and, hence, curating memories and relationships). However, creativity also appears in the research methods that were used to draw out the participants’ stories, revealing this intersection of resilience, material culture and everyday creativity.
Introduction
The discussion in this chapter critically explores resilience, learning (as a process of being and becoming fully human) (Gill, 2014) and everyday creativity through self-curation in the context of the process of decluttering as a response to loss. Although consumer societies’ concern with materialism has long been seen as detrimental to the quality of human relationships, Miller (2008, p 1) points out that ‘the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people’. How are our relationships with people, places and things affected through loss over time, and is that resulting absence tangible, emotional or somehow both? How does loss change and transform us as we age? Absence and loss are not merely emptiness or a state of non- or no-longer-being. Instead, absence is ‘something performed, textured and materialised through relations and processes, and via objects’ (Meyer, 2012, p 103). Meyer goes on to suggest:
Although, strictly speaking, absence is a thing without matter, absence is ordered, remembered, evoked and made discussable and sufferable through materialities. And even though absence escapes – and can only ever be partially and temporarily contained in – certain places, it is within these places and through leaving various kinds of traces that absence comes to matter. (Meyer, 2012, p 109)
Within the broader context of this discussion, the constructs of resilience and self-curation are problematic in themselves as descriptors of what happens when lives are lived through profound experiences of loss over time and in particularly resonant places.