Geraldine Donoghue

“You Could Scream the Place Down” Five Poems on the Experience of Aged Care

This article presents five poems constructed from interviews with older people adjusting to living in residential aged care. They are part of the “Inside Aged Care” project, ongoing longitudinal phenomenological research tracking the lived experience of aged care from the perspective of residents, family members, and service providers. Poetry, through the process of poetic transcription, provided an engaging, evocative, and almost visceral way to help us appreciate what it might be like to be aging in aged care. To date, despite a growing body of work documenting the importance and impact of research in the form of poetry, applying a literary lens is rare in gerontological research. At a very practical level, therefore, we hope these poems help older people, their families, students, and those working in aged care better understand the unique world and perspective of new aged care residents.

‘I Understand. I Am a Participant’: Navigating the ‘Fuzzy’ Boundaries of Visual Methods in Qualitative Longitudinal Research

In this chapter we discuss how utilizing the participatory visual methodology, photovoice, in an aged care context with its unique communal setting, raised several ‘fuzzy boundary’ ethical dilemmas. To illustrate these challenges, we draw on immersive field notes from an ongoing qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) exploring the lived experience of aged care from the perspective of older residents and focus on interactions with one participant, 81-year-old Cassie. We explore how the camera, which is integral to the photovoice method, altered the researcher/participant ethical dynamics by becoming a continual ‘connector’ to the researcher. The camera took on a distinct agency, acting as a non-threatening ‘portal’ that lengthened contact, provided informal opportunities to alter the relationship dynamics and enabled unplanned participant revelation.