Negotiating Well-being: Older People's Narratives of Relationships and Relationality

Abstract

This article discusses well-being in old age by drawing on findings from participatory research carried out by older co-researchers exploring how older people learn to sustain their own and others’ well-being. It considers the way in which research based in older people's experience can inform ethical policy and practice capable of delivering well-being. It critiques individualized notions of well-being and provides a counter-perspective based in relational understandings of what it is to be human drawn from feminist care ethics. This offers a different way of understanding the significance of social relationships and networks to older people's well-being from that offered by a focus on ‘community’ which has emerged in the communitarian discourses of the UK Coalition government. It illustrates this with older people's accounts of well-being highlighting the ways in which relationships with people, places and spaces are negotiated with ageing. Finally it argues that this relational conceptualization of well-being embodies values and the ethical dimensions of responsibility based in lived experiences. This provides the basis for alternative values-based policies and practices which we need to distinguish from the instrumental expression of social relationships and ‘community’ within communitarian discourses.

Keywords:

• Older People
• Relational Well-being
• Feminist Care Ethics
• Relationships
• Relationality

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude and thanks to Marian Barnes for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to Beatrice Gahagan, Age UK Brighton and Hove all the members of older people's co-research group for their collaboration on this project.

Notes

1. Names are pseudonyms, ages are in brackets.