Using photography to understand change and continuity in the history of residential care for older people

Abstract

The Last Refuge by Peter Townsend is a seminal study of residential care for older people. The fieldwork was carried out in the late 1950s and the data are now deposited in the National Social Policy and Social Change Archive at the University of Essex. We have undertaken research, funded by the ESRC, which has revisited Townsend's work and some of the homes he studied in order to conduct an overtime comparison. In this paper we focus on Townsend's use of photography and our subsequent use of photography in our revisiting study. We argue that although Townsend did not analyse his photographs, they were significant data for use in his arguments critiquing residential care. They were, however, the product of a different socio‐historical context to our own and as such posed considerable practical and ethical challenges for us when attempting to use this aspect of his methodology for an overtime comparison. We argue that despite the resulting constraints, photography was an important part of our methodology, enabling comparisons and illuminating historical patterns in residential care for older people.

Keywords:

• Visual Methods
• Residential Care
• Older People, Townsend
• Secondary Analysis
• Research Ethics

Acknowledgements

The research described here was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Grant reference: RES 000‐23‐0995. We would like to thank Marie Gillespie for her comments on Townsend's photographs and Jon Prosser for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We are grateful to Reg Paine for permission to publish his photograph and letter and to Peter Townsend for permission to publish his photographs and for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.