Coming of old age: understanding older adults’ engagement and needs in coproduction activities for healthy ageing

ABSTRACT

We report an investigation of how older adults engage in social activities and community events in support of their mental, physical, and emotional health. We focus on personal and collaborative agency in a community context, and construe health as an outcome that is coproduced by a person and other engaged community members. Using qualitative methods, we investigated the coproduction of health among members of retirement communities and people who are ageing in place. We found that our participants, irrespective of living arrangements, engaged in a diverse range of coproduction activities, including physical, socialising, service, discussion, and interest-based activities. We also identified desired but less-supported coproduction opportunities, such as opportunistic activities and the need to better appropriate social resources to enable coproductions. We draw from these findings to consider design implications of technological support for facilitating older adults to coproduce.

KEYWORDS:

• Coproduction
• timebanking
• older adults
• health and well-being
• user-centred design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Chien Wen Yuan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0807-2714

Notes

1 http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation: [Grant Number 1502176].