Breaking research boundaries: a poetic representation of life in an aged care facility

ABSTRACT

This article presents five poems constructed from the transcripts of interviews with older Australians who had recently moved into residential aged care. This process, known as poetic inquiry, is an emotionally engaging way to interpret, represent, and communicate research data. The poems provide an engaging, evocative, and almost visceral experience of life in aged care. Yet despite notable exceptions, poetic inquiry has received relatively little attention from psychologists. As well as sharing five poems, this article explores why psychology has not yet actively engaged with arts-based research, proposes a rationale for greater engagement, and outlines some key learnings from my engagement (as a psychologist) with poetic inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• aged care
• ageing
• poetic inquiry
• poetry
• psychologists
• reflections

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the residents of the case study Aged Care Facility, for so generously engaging with the research and so candidly sharing their feelings, reflections and memories. Thank you. Aspects of this research were supported through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP130100036), and the broader project team of Laurie Buys, Nicole Devlin, and Geraldine Donoghue. In particular, I owe Geraldine a debt of gratitude, for introducing me to sociology, the poetic approach and being a critical friend with this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evonne Miller

Evonne Miller is an associate professor, environmental psychologist, and director of the QUT Design Lab in the School of Design, Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology. Her current research in aged care explores the potential of creative arts and visual methodologies (poetic inquiry, photovoice) as a means of data collection, analysis, and dissemination. She brings a unique trans-disciplinary perspective to poetic inquiry, originally trained in experiential quantitative psychology, but having worked in a design school for the past decade and increasingly immersed in design and arts-based qualitative research approaches.