Abstract
Robert Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author and pioneer in aging, succinctly described the aging experience as:
. . .contingent upon physical health, personality, earlier—life experiences, the actual circumstances of late-life events . . . and the social support one receives. . .all of these are crucial and interconnected elements which together determine the quality of late life. (Butler, 1975, p. 2)
Inherent to these elements are the human communication behaviors that shape our attitudes and ideas about aging, influence the way we communicate about topics related to aging and to people we consider as older, structure the experiences of the elderly within our own communities, frame the way we make sense of ageist acts against us, and formulate our own communication behaviors related to aging. Research on these communication processes, which establish and create shared meaning over the life span, remains limited in aging literature and is often secondary to biomedical research. The absence of this methodological approach in aging research neglects the subjective, in-depth examination of contextual factors such as gender and social norms that influence the “quality of late life.” This special issue of Research on Aging seeks to focus on qualitative communication research with and about elderly adults and life span communication. The focus of this issue is on the role and impact of aging communities on the design and practice of interpersonal communication.
This special issue addresses an underrepresented aspect of aging research and aims to highlight the flexibility of qualitative methods. With an emphasis and appreciation for the contextual nature of data, these articles explore sense-making among couples about cancer, satisfaction, and well-being associated with everyday interactions with organizations, discussions about end-of-life preferences among families, the ways that experiences create meaning and social identity for women, and stereotypes about sexual identity. Collectively, these articles illustrate contextual behaviors within groups through a variety of methodological approaches specific to the qualitative research paradigm.
For example, personal narratives are qualitative tools that can reveal relationships among individuals that are difficult to explain but central to late-life experiences. The interrupted life narrative is the focal point of Pecchionni’s work that explores the concept of age relativism among cancer patients and their spouses by analyzing their comments about aging as triggered by the cancer experience. Personal stories are used to study perceptions of life narratives, perceptions of an idealized healthy body, and how cancer creates an ill body. She further explores how the disease experience impacts expectations of aging as a couple and how spousal caregivers perceive cancer as an extension of the life script of their relationship.
Similarly, narrative inquiry can reveal group experiences. Exploring the metanarrative of culture and medicine, which prioritizes the physical body over the psychosocial or mental impact of disease and illness, Field-Springer considers women’s social identity and how a woman’s body as site of illness can influence reidentification and resistance of the aging process. She explores the ways in which women renegotiate their own aging narratives, counter to the biomedical paradigm which separates mind from body, and investigates the narrative construction of aging. A narrative analysis of interviews collected from women involved in a female-focused health care program is used to study how women cope with the process of aging.
Interviews and thematic analysis are qualitative tools that can also be used to describe behavioral patterns recognized and unrecognized by participants. Gill investigated communication between family members and explored health care decision making and coping surrounding the difficult decision to move an aging parent to a care facility. The parent–daughter relationship provides a context for exploring guilt, ambivalence, and uncertainty often characterized by decision making about care placement and provision. Personal interviews were used as a point of data collection, analysis included data coding of participant recognized and nonrecognized themes to explore manifest and latent recognition of uncertainty.
Two unique qualitative communication tools that facilitate the study of complex interactions and influences are discourse analysis and “Ologs.” Discourse analysis is an approach used to study naturally occurring conversation by analyzing relational aspects of communication rather than textual structure. Scott and Caughlin explore differences in end-of-life talk in family conversations about end-of-life health decision making. Multiple goals theory is used for a deductive qualitative analysis of conversation to reveal characteristics in the quality of communication about end-of-life health decisions. Thick, rich description is used to move beyond frequency of talk about aging-related topics to study the features of conversation. “Ologs,” observation logs that are event contingent diaries, were used by Richardson and Zorn to examine elders’ interactions with organizations and provide insight on well-being and positive feelings linked to the characteristics and practices of organizations. Olog booklets provided information on “interactions incidents” including purpose, role, frequency, and satisfaction of interaction, allowing the researchers to study environmental factors that influence elders’ organizational participation and satisfaction.
Finally, qualitative methods allow participants to explain their experiences in their own words. In this way, meaningfulness is defined by the participant, not the researcher. Working to identify how age stereotypes divide older employees from younger employees, Dixon employs a phenomenological inquiry of lived experiences in the workplace and examines sexuality stereotypes of the elderly. Active interviews are social productions of knowledge and orientation, creating the narrator’s awareness of understanding while at the same time providing data to the researcher. This approach facilitates exploration of attitudes and how they are communicated to others about specific groups.
The aim of this special issue is to provide a national forum to highlight qualitative research in communication and aging. The goal is to showcase the dimensions of qualitative methods and the unique contribution of communication scholars to the field of aging. Qualitative approaches extend our knowledge of aging by allowing researchers to consider a variety of factors including function, content, process, and contextual constraints. Furthering the discussion about the “quality of late life” and new directions in research can be garnered from an understanding of why phenomena occur and reveal the nuances of circumstances that are sometimes overlooked by strict scientific/empirical methods.