Older women’s engagement in community occupations: Considerations of lifespan and place

Abstract

Background: To reach the promise of age-friendly communities, more complete understandings of how participation in community occupations occurs, in place and over time, is needed.

Aim: To explore older Canadian women’s engagement in community occupations as it occurs over the lifespan and in context.

Materials and methods: Data from three selected participants were drawn from an exploration of older adults’ social connectedness in neighbourhoods, which involved an ethnographic approach involving narrative interviews, go-along interviews, and activity tracking and follow-up interviews. A transactional lens oriented analysis, considering occupation in place, over time. Analysis involved identifying key storylines and themes and drew on conceptualizations of transition and continuity.

Results: The participants’ stories revolved around two themes: continuity within leisure over time and social engagement as a work in progress. The participants demonstrated differing patterns of achieving continuity within leisure and worked to maintain social engagement in the face of continually evolving social networks.

Conclusions and significance: Findings enhance understandings of transition, continuity and the transactions between person and place that shape leisure and social engagement over time. Occupational therapists can consider community occupations from a transactional lens within services and policy to better support older women’s participation and inclusion in neighbourhoods.

Keywords:

• Community participation
• continuity
• global positioning systems
• narrative
• neighbourhoods
• occupational engagement
• older adults
• transition

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the time the three women provided to participate in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.