Dealing with Complexity in Research Processes and Findings: How Do Older Women Negotiate and Challenge Images of Aging?

Abstract

The Representing Self—Representing Ageing initiative has been funded by the ESRC as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing cross-council research program. It has consisted of four projects with older women using visual research methods and participatory approaches to enable women to articulate their experiences of aging and to create alternative images of aging. Complex research processes were utilized. Innovative methods included the use of art elicitation, photo diaries, film booths, and phototherapy.

Keywords:

• women and aging
• aging and popular culture
• feminism and aging
• images of aging
• participatory arts
• visual research methods

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Representing Self—Representing Ageing initiative has been funded by the ESRC as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing cross-council research programme (grant number RES.356 25–0040). Thanks to all the women who took part in the project and the project team members for their insights, commitment, and inspirational work: Claire Allam (filmmaker), Merryn Gott (coinvestigator), Clare McManus (Aventus), Alison Morton (curator), Naomi Richards (researcher), Judith Taylor (project administrator), and also the commissioned artists: Monica Fernández, Rosy Martin, and Laura Pannack.

Notes

1. Men are less able to maintain a dependent spouse in the home; thus, it is “predominantly women's labour that maintains aged couples in their own homes, with consequent savings to the public sector” (Gibson, 1998, p. 75). Gibson also challenges the concept of “interdependence,” providing evidence that even disabled and frail elderly women continue to provide a proportionally larger share of domestic responsibilities, especially cooking (p. 84). Late-in-life poverty and links to women's responsibilities for childcare are more obvious (Calasanti, 2010). Other structural inequalities highlighted have been the devalued status of women's work and the tendency for women to be segregated into lower-paying fields of work (Calasanti, 2010). What is defined as “woman's work” changes historically, but it is often relatively less well rewarded. Calasanti, in particular, is at pains to point out that a complex set of gender relations combine to result in late-in-life poverty for women, and that in Britain women are almost twice as likely as men to experience late-in-life poverty (Calasanti, 2010, p. 722).

2. “Social policy provisions for frail and disabled older people are predicated on the expectation that women will provide the vast majority of care at no fiscal cost to the state and that much of the remainder will be subsidised by unpaid female labour” (Gibson, 1998, p. 73). Gibson notes research that points to this being a pattern across diverse systems of health care, including Britain, Australia, North America, Canada, and Scandinavia.

3. Research Programme Proposal, ESRC New Dynamics of Ageing RES-356-25-0040 (Warren, Gott, Hogan, in collaboration with McManus & Martin, 2009).

4. Coming of Age was billed as “a week of programming dedicated to the over 60s in a bid to challenge some of the preconceptions and stereotypes surrounding the lives of older people” and was screened in November 2009 on Channel 4 in the U.K. Several of Channel 4's favorite programm turned their attention to the over 60s.

5. Wittgenstein as cited in Moi (1999, p. 7).

6. Research Programme Proposal, ESRC New Dynamics of Ageing (Warren, Gott, Hogan, in collaboration with McManus & Martin, 2009).

7. Reflexivity is an awareness of oneself in the field of action and one's role in creating that situation: “Reflexivity is thus distinct from reflectivity in its focus on the constitutive role of the self” (Bloor & Wood, 2006, pp. 145–146).

8. Certainly, Oakley (1981) notes that, in “departing from conventional interviewing ethics,” she was concerned to give “the subjective situation of women greater visibility not only in sociology, but, more importantly, in society, than it has traditionally had” (p. 48).

9. There is considerable debate in psychotherapy literature on this point, and facilitators must vary. I personally find that if I muse about my own material too much in sessions, I can get distracted from my role as facilitator (this is even the case in scrutinizing my own emotional responses when I have not actively made a disclosure or image at all, and part of the role of an analytic psychotherapist is to reflect on her own feelings about what is happening in the group in an ongoing way), but in a feminist model it does feel inappropriate to maintain a completely “opaque” approach, revealing absolutely nothing of oneself, so participating during initial warm-up exercises before the group gets properly underway is a compromise.

10. From the mission statement: www.eventus.org.uk. Eventus is a Regularly Funded Organisation (RFO) of Arts Council England. It aims its work at the 23% of the population identified in Arts Council England's research (Arts Audiences: Insight, Arts Council England, 2008) as “not currently engaged in the arts,” primarily, though not exclusively, through partnerships with nonarts organizations.

11. http://www.representing-ageing.com/

12. The artist's commentary. Personal correspondence, Susan Hogan, 2010.

13. http://www.representing-ageing.com/