Lizzie Ward

Crossing the Divide between Theory and Practice: Research and an Ethic of Care

This paper explores the application of ethic of care principles to research practice. It reflects on a research partnership between a voluntary-sector organisation (VSO) for older people and a university research centre (URC). The focus is a participatory research project on older people and well-being in which older volunteers were involved as co-researchers. The shared values of the VSOs culture of practice and the participatory approach of the university researchers have enabled joint research projects to be developed within an ethic of care framework. The model sought to break down the barriers between expert and lay knowledge and encouraged the mutual recognition, sharing and validating of different areas of expertise. An ethic of care framework offers context-specific ways of understanding and responding to the ethical challenges of undertaking participatory research, and to the relational aspects of well-being identified by older people during the course of the work.

Being well enough in old age

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. We critically explore normative notions of independence, autonomy and consumerism at the heart of policy on well-being and ageing and suggest that indexes of older people’s happiness conceal more than they reveal. We illustrate this theoretical approach 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 we found that keeping well in old age involves demanding emotional and organizational labour both for older people and for family and friends. We suggest the need for ethical and relational sensibilities at the heart of policy on well-being and ageing.

Transforming Practice with Older People through an Ethic of Care

This article explores the relevance of deliberative practices framed by feminist care ethics to social work practice with older people. It draws on two connected projects which brought together older people: practitioners and academics. The first was a participatory research project in which the significance of care to well-being in old age emerged. The second was a knowledge exchange project which generated learning resources for social care practice based on the research findings of the first project. Here we analyse selected transcripts of recordings from meetings of both projects to consider the ways that discussions about lived experiences and everyday lives demonstrate care through this dialogue. Using this analysis, we propose that care ethics can be useful in transforming relationships between older people and those working with them through the creation of hybrid spaces in which ‘care-full deliberation’ can happen. We argue that such reflective spaces can enable transformative dialogue about care and its importance to older people and offer a counterbalance to the procedurally driven environments in which much social work practice takes place and can support practice more attuned to the circumstances and concerns of older people.

Alcohol use in later life – older people's perspectives

Purpose – There has been increasing recognition that alcohol may be a source of problems for older people. This has been reflected in the increase in alcohol‐related hospital admissions for people over 65. Although a neglected area in policy and research within the UK, studies from health and social care practice have drawn attention to the complexity of the issues for practitioners. This paper seeks to report on qualitative research which aims to generate a wider evidence base by exploring the circumstances in which older people drink; the meaning that drinking alcohol has for them and its impact; and acknowledging that this can be a pleasurable and positive experience, as well as something that can have adverse health, financial, personal and interpersonal impacts.Design/methodology/approach – A major challenge of the research, given the sensitive nature of the topic, was how to approach older people and ask about their experiences of alcohol use. A participatory methodology was developed in which older...

Stretching middle age: the lessons and labours of active ageing in the makeover show

This article responds to the claim that there is a critical neglect of age and ageing across media and television studies. It does so by arguing an exploration of the insights from the fields of critical gerontology/Age Studies and Media Studies allows critical scrutiny of the intersection between populist stereotyping of age, the pedagogic function of the makeover culture, and the prevailing public policy discourses that place responsibility on individuals, notably women, to hold back their old age. This article extends the argument that the pedagogical function of the makeover is to train us into culturally inhabitable bodies, to claim that age shapes what corporeal and cultural dwellings are currently intelligible.

Negotiating Well-being: Older People's Narratives of Relationships and Relationality

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. It considers the way in which research based in older peoples 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 peoples 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 peoples 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.

‘Paying our own way’: Application of the capability approach to explore older people’s experiences of self-funding social care:

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.