Expanding Capabilities in Integrated Service Areas (ISAs) As Communities of Care: A Study of Dutch Older Adults’ Narratives on the Life They Have Reason to Value

Abstract

We apply the capability approach to understand the scope and limitations of community efforts to support older adults dwelling in integrated service areas (ISAs) in the Netherlands. An ISA is a neighborhood-based form of care organization aimed at the widening of opportunities to achieve well-being goals by building on local community resources. To gain insight in the complex effects of ISAs on older adults’ well-being, a narrative study was performed on their daily lived experiences. Emerging narrative patterns were aggregated in a Manifesto of the Independently Living Older Person. Narrative patterns and Manifesto provided insight in both respondents’ capabilities and functionings, expressing values such as autonomy, human dignity and contributions to community care by older adults themselves. Older adults balance realistic and optimistic expectations for the future in ways that can be explained using the concepts of capability security, adaptive preferences, care-receiving and caring-with. Since interventions transpire through local interactions and shared practices, ISAs represent a social space in between individuality and collectivity where older adults enact community by sharing common ends. Findings imply that the complex interventions developed in ISAs expand older adults’ capabilities involving the challenge for all stakeholders to negotiate individual freedoms in community care settings.

Keywords:

• Capabilities
• Well-being
• Health
• Aging-in-place
• Narrative methods
• Older adults
• Community

About the Authors

Erik Jansen is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the Research Centre for Social Support and Community Care of HAN University of Applied Sciences. His research interests include the capability approach and social work, community development, narrative methods, change management, social innovation and action research.

Roos Pijpers is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment of Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research interests include social and cultural diversity, minority integration, active citizenship and place attachment. In September 2016, she started a five-year research project on cultural and sexual diversity in the aging and care experiences of older people.

George de Kam is a Professor of Housing and Land Markets at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen. One of his research topics is local/area-specific arrangements for aging-in-place, such as integrated service areas (ISAs). He also publishes on the provision of land for social housing, urban regeneration and Third-sector governance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ZonMw [314100301].