Situating the life story narratives of aging immigrants within a structural context: the intersectional life course perspective as research praxis

Abstract

Research on racialized older immigrants does not fully acknowledge the interplay between the life course experiences of diverse populations and the structural conditions that shape these experiences. Our research team has developed the intersectional life course perspective to enhance researchers’ capacity to take account of the cumulative effects of structural discrimination as people experience it throughout the life course, the meanings that people attribute to those experiences, and the implications these have on later life. Here we propose an innovative methodological approach that combines life story narrative and photovoice methods in order to operationalize the intersectional life course. We piloted this approach in a study of the everyday stories of aging among diverse immigrant older adults in two distinct Canadian provinces with the goals of enhancing capacity to account for both context and story and engaging with participants and stakeholders from multiple sectors in order to influence change.

Keywords

immigrants older adults intersectionality critical life course photovoice life story narrative Canada

Introduction

Over the past two decades, there has been growing interest in understanding the impact of immigration on aging, particularly within Global North societies, including Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Koehn et al., 2010; Durst, 2010). Reasons include emerging concerns regarding the aging of the general population and the increasing proportion of older adult immigrants among them. The latter trend is the consequence of both the aging of immigrants who entered these societies earlier in their life course and the increase in the number of older adults immigrating in recent years under various family reunification programs (Ferrer et al., 2017b). To date, health and social care practitioners and policymakers within Global North societies have been slow to recognize the issues facing aging immigrants and have paid scant attention to adapting programs and policies to better meet their needs.

Gerontological research on immigrant older adults has nonetheless proliferated since the introduction of ethnogerontology by Jackson (1985) as a subdiscipline that focuses extensively on the causes, processes, and consequences of racialization, national origin, and culture on individual and population aging. Scholars have addressed several key areas, most notably those related to differences in health status, economic (in)stability, family relationships, and (in)accessibility of health and social care services (e.g. Durst and MacLean, 2010; Whitfield and Baker, 2014). For example, recent immigrant older adults and some immigrants who have aged in Canada are more likely to be disadvantaged by the effects of lifelong intersections of economic and social discrimination rooted in racialization (Brotman, 2003; Ferrer et al., 2017b; Koehn et al., 2013; Coloma and Pino, 2016; Guruge et al., 2010; Hulko, 2016). Many immigrant older adults living in Global North societies experience significant health problems exacerbated by the inaccessibility of health and social care services (Brotman, 2003; Koehn, 2009; Koehn et al., 2013; Guruge et al., 2010). Finally, unique configurations of family care illustrate the central role of reciprocity within immigrant families, but they can also give rise to considerable stress (Ferrer et al., 2017a; Coloma and Pino, 2016; Sun, 2014).

Ethnogerontology has generated important understandings of immigrant aging, but it has been limited in certain respects. First, social constructions such as race, culture, and ethnicity are poorly defined and their inconsistent use obscures their complexity and results in essentialist explanations of health and social outcomes (Ajrouch and Abdulrahim, 2014; Rozario and Chadiha, 2014). Second, such oversimplification of within-group differences ignores cultural dynamism and deflects attention from the structural inequities that underlie apparent cultural/racial differences (Koehn et al., 2013). Culturalist and racist explanations of inequities fail to account for the heterogeneity that arises from unique configurations of determinants of aging. These include the influence of income and poverty, education, stress associated with minority status, social capital, neighborhood characteristics and service access, and immigration status and experiences. For example, refugee or sponsored immigrant status renders older adults especially vulnerable to economic insecurity, abuse, and isolation. Inadvertently, such explanations shift the burden of responsibility for inequitable treatment to immigrant older adults and their families (Koehn et al., 2012). Researchers have suggested that problematic constructions of aging, immigration, and racialization are connected to assumptions in the field of gerontology (Phillipson, 2015; Torres, 2015), most notably the dominance of solution-based approaches that privilege models of success and continuity (Torres, 2012). Finally, the vast majority of ethnogerontological research has been conducted in the United States with populations and historical and policy contexts that are distinct from those found in other Global North societies. Most immigrant minorities in Canada are from Asian countries (especially the Philippines, India, and China), whereas the experiences of ‘Asian/Pacific Islanders’ and other new immigrant groups are relatively underrepresented in the US literature and have unique characteristics from better-known African-American and Hispanic populations (Fuller-Thomson and Chi, 2012).

The intersectional life course approach, presented in Ferrer et al. (2017b), is a rich theoretical model that offers the possibility of accounting for specificity and connection between the lived experience and structural discrimination that influences the experiences of aging in Canada for immigrant older adults. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate its application as a methodology through the integration of life story narrative and photovoice data collection methods.

Intersectionality and the life course

A handful of gerontologists who focus on aging in relation to transnationalism and im/migration (Baldassar, 2007; Torres, 2012; Treas, 2008) have begun to address the impact of race and racialization on older immigrants. These efforts have contributed to our understanding of how racialized immigrants experience aging in the diaspora and in the homeland; yet, few frameworks make connections between personal stories of aging with the structural barriers, realities, and histories that have shaped racialized communities.

In response to the call for more comprehensive frameworks, social gerontological researchers have applied intersectionality (Koehn et al., 2013; Hopkins and Pain, 2007; Hulko, 2016; Krekula, 2007) or life course (Dannefer and Settersten, 2010; Grenier, 2012) lenses to the study of aging. According to Hankivsky (2014: 2),

Intersectionality promotes an understanding of human beings as shaped by the interaction of different social locations (e.g., ‘race’/ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, religion). These interactions occur within a context of connected systems and structures of power (e.g., laws, policies, state governments and other political and economic unions, religious institutions, media). Through such processes, interdependent forms of privilege and oppression shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, ableism and patriarchy are created.

With respect to the life course, Hendricks (2012: 226) has written,

Examining the life course is about analyzing change. From birth until death lives are in flux. A life course perspective is about examining changes, whether they be biological, developmental (including social and psychological factors), historical, or geographic and attempting to identify which factors affect the arc of change, and what transformations change brings.

Life course researchers pay close attention in their analyses to the influence of sociohistorical and geographical locations on developmental paths, the timing of people’s life transitions and their resulting life course trajectories, the diversity within age cohorts, interconnections with the lives of others, individual agency and its potential to influence social structures, and the influence of the past on the present.

There are benefits and challenges to doing research using either approach (Dressel et al., 1997; Hulko, 2016; Krekula, 2007). Intersectionality is valued for its incorporation of structural oppression as a key feature of understanding the realities of social exclusion faced by older racialized groups (Hulko, 2011); yet, it can be challenging to apply as a methodology (Hankivsky and Cormier, 2011; McCall, 2005), as evidenced by the relative availability of theoretical/policy interpretations as compared to empirical studies. In addition, there is often a risk of identity reductionism within intersectionality research on aging that focuses attention on only two or three ‘master identities’ to manage the complexity of doing the research (i.e. race and age or sexuality and age). Finally, some depict intersectionality as more of an analytic lens than a research approach (Anthias, 2013).

Social gerontologists have embraced life course theory more fully in research design, and view the life course approach as invaluable to an understanding of the lived experience of individuals, including those from ethnocultural and other minority groups (Brotman et al., 2015). Where it falls short is in its inability to draw out an explicitly structural analysis from the storied experiences of participants (Dannefer and Settersten, 2010).

Recognizing the complementary strengths and shortcomings of the two approaches, Ferrer et al. (2017b) have proposed the joint application of intersectionality and life course perspectives as a means to better understand the structural and institutional forces that shape everyday life experiences of older people at marginal and racialized social locations. They suggest that an intersectional life course approach allows for the identification and consideration of the mutually reinforcing categories of (1) life events, timing, and structural forces; (2) local and globally linked lives; (3) identities and categories/processes of difference; and (4) domination, agency, and resistance.

Consideration of the timing of key life events and the structural forces surrounding them contributes significantly to our knowledge of how people understand and experience these events. For example, studies of people’s experiences of immigration from the Global South to Canada are greatly enhanced by considerations of immigration policies and the process of relocation, settlement, acculturation, and/discrimination. In parallel, the analysis of time allows researchers to incorporate intersectional perspectives that identify historical and contemporary logics, systems of domination, and processes of differentiation (Ferrer et al., 2017b). The idea of globally and locally linked lives acknowledges that aging is seldom experienced individually and invokes relationships between individuals, families, and communities across generations and provincial/international borders. Thus, the concept of globally linked lives considers how people organize their lives and ‘formulate their identities based on relationships that occur with family, ancestors, between generations and across transnational contexts’ (Ferrer et al., 2017b: 12–13).

The intersectional life course further maintains that while identities are articulated as fluid and shifting, they are also influenced by categories and/or processes of difference for the purpose of claims-making (Ferrer et al., 2017b). Finally, Ferrer et al. (2017b) assert that even though people’s lives may be shaped and often dominated by systems of oppression, they also demonstrate agency and resistance. Experiences of domination and resistance are integral to the life course and are simultaneously structured and interpretive. Both are constructed and experienced in relation to difference, but also in response to wider systems of domination.

Enacting intersectional life course through life story narrative and photovoice methods

One way to transition the intersectional life course from a theoretical framework to an applied methodology is through the integration of life story narrative and photovoice data collection methods. It is important here to distinguish what we mean by these terms.

Oral or written ‘documents of life’ as captured in interviews or personal letters were viewed as a prime source of empirical data by founders of sociology, dating back to Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–1921) Polish peasant study (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006). In the postpositivist vein of the era, sociologists viewed these personal testimonies as authentic representations of social ‘realities.’ The authenticity of such narratives has long since been subject to scrutiny: narratives, like all forms of knowledge, are value mediated and context-specific (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006: online). As Bruner (1986) explains, narratives are expressions of a person’s experience upon which they have imposed a beginning and an end. Individual experience is itself an intersubjective articulation of a temporal flow of perceptions of images of reality and is therefore culturally constructed. Moreover, ‘we can only ever know completely our own experiences. The experiences of others are necessarily filtered through our own perceptual screens …. To further complicate matters, we find that even direct narratives of experience are subject to censorship, repression and selective representation’ (Koehn, 1999: 22). And, importantly for our research, an individual’s understanding and hence expression of an experience may change over the life course.

In many respects, we have in our work collected life stories that ‘correspond to the constructivist precepts of plural and plastic realities, the telling of which are inevitably influenced by the investigator as well as the individual’s cultural tradition and his or her current circumstances’ (Koehn, 1999: 67). Lived experience is rendered by the participant into a life story coconstructed with the researcher, and this narrative is in turn subjected to further interpretation in the retelling (Goodson, 2001).

We further bring to this work a critical ontological perspective that acknowledges that ‘all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are socially and historically constituted’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 1994: 139). In this regard, we situate our approach to narrative on the boundaries of life story and life history, the latter of which seeks to contextualize the biographical accounts of individuals in relation to structural forces within historic, geographic, and cultural communities. Unlike the life history approach, however, we do not resort to external sources to verify the ‘truthfulness’ of an account, for to do so is to reify that account as a claim on a positivistic notion of ‘reality.’ It is important nonetheless to situate individual narratives, lest their voices ‘echo in an otherwise empty world . . .[devoid of] social context, social action, and social interaction’ (Atkinson, 1997: 339). We encourage participants to take this extra step when, in the second of three interviews, detailed later, we invite them to widen their view of the incentives for their life course decisions to include social context and structural realities.

In the second and third phases of our research we introduce photovoice as a data collection method. Wang and Redwood-Jones (2001) describe photovoice as a form of participatory action research that, consistent with our critical-constructivist approach, provides photographers with a powerful means of expressing their specific experience of reality while encouraging them to think critically about their communities. This critical reflection, fostered by discussion of the meaning of the visual images, is an important component of photovoice, as is the production of shared knowledge through the display of images intended to reach policy- and practice-level decision-makers.

The use of photovoice methodology in tandem with a life story narrative approach has the potential to fill an important epistemological and methodological gap within social gerontological literature by enabling older people, who are considered experts on matters concerning their own lives and communities, to name their own experiences and to shape interpretations, including those related to structural oppression and resistance/resilience. Photovoice enhances opportunities to voice individual and collective experience through the incorporation of artistic expression (Cunsolo Willox et al., 2013). It provides a mechanism for participants to engage more deeply as active agents within research processes and products (Sanon et al., 2014) by inviting them to reflect on their lived experiences and to articulate the complex intergenerational, transnational, and community relationships that support or inhibit them (Cunsolo Willox et al., 2013). Photovoice is increasingly used by gerontological researchers to explore diverse perspectives of older adults on their lived experiences (Sanon et al., 2014). However, few studies apply the explicit social change objectives of the methodology within their research design.

Like narrative, photovoice is susceptible to unwittingly positivist claims about its ability to reveal ‘authentic’ realities about communities when, in fact, the images and their explanations are socially and culturally constructed representations like any other and must be analyzed as such (Shankar, 2016). Like many others concerned with power relationships in the research enterprise (see especially Mazzei and Jackson, 2009), Shankar further warns against the inflated assumption that these images ‘give voice’ to marginalized subjects when in fact ‘structures of power inequity continue to shape how a voice can be heard’ (2016: 159). He suggests that one way to counter stereotypic views of marginalized people is to take their images seriously as works of art capable of shaping, rather than merely mirroring, reality. In this sense, participants become ‘creative producers capable of making arguments about life through their aesthetic choices’ (Shankar, 2016: 159). Acknowledging these limitations in our own work, we strive continuously to diminish the inherent power imbalance between academics and participants in the research.

Here we explore the possibility that mindful utilization of life story narrative and photovoice strategies in combination can reflect both the structural critique and social justice principles embedded in intersectionality and the subjectivity principles of the life course. We do not expect that the methodological approach can be applied systematically across all contexts; it can nonetheless provide guidance to qualitative researchers and social gerontologists who wish to employ this perspective.

Lived experiences of immigrant older adults project

Project objectives

We used a life story narrative–photovoice methodology to engage with diverse immigrant older adults in order to highlight their unique narratives of growing old through a framework designed to capture complex and intersecting identities while simultaneously exposing the often-invisible institutional structures and relationships of power that mark older adults’ interactions with family, community, and the state in their everyday lives. We aimed to enrich our understanding of the realities of aging immigrants in Canada and encourage knowledge exchange with service providers and policy makers to advance equity and social justice. The remainder of the paper describes our research design and process in greater detail.

Engagement, participation, and recruitment

We conducted our study in two culturally and geographically distinct Canadian cities—Montreal, Quebec, and Vancouver, British Columbia—between December 2014 and March 2016. The diversity of aging and immigration within Montreal and Vancouver calls attention to the regional variation in recognition, public policy initiatives, and service delivery options across Canada. In both cities, the proportions of immigrants in general and older immigrants are much higher than Canadian averages of 22% and 16%, respectively. These figures, respectively, are 34% and 20% in Montreal, and 41% and 21.5% in Vancouver (Statistics Canada, 2017). Yet each city has unique and varied ways of understanding aging within immigrant communities and for addressing access and equity barriers among these populations. The geographic leads of our research team [Brotman and Koehn] worked separately when dealing with local decisions such as recruitment, interviewing, and knowledge mobilization but were coordinated by [Ferrer] and convened regularly to share insights gained from each site on both process and findings.

To reflect our interest in collaboration and social justice, we applied the photovoice principles of community engagement, which included an advisory group structure to enhance research design and facilitate uptake of findings by policy makers and service providers (Delgado, 2015). Our local advisory teams and outreach partnerships represented targeted communities. Their inclusion enhanced trust-building, data collection, and analysis processes and facilitated our engagement with diverse immigrant populations. Our advisory groups also included stakeholders deemed capable of influencing policy and/or programs within their spheres of engagement, including immigrant-serving, aging, and multicultural community-based sectors.

Over 2.5 years, we drew on existing networks of the coresearchers and advisory group members to identify participants. Our iterative process of participant recruitment, interviewing, and reflection on each participant and each of their three interviews informed subsequent recruitment decisions. Our research team met locally and nationally to discuss and ensure diversity across cultural groups, gender, time and type of immigration, and so on. We attempted to balance regional decisions so that each site would have some overlap in categories of social location. Our aim was to provide a point of potential connection between sites/community groups, rather than comparison per se.

When our networks could not fill the identified gaps, we hired bi- or multilingual outreach coordinators from the target communities to contact organizations (e.g. religious, activity, and support groups), build connections, and establish trust with potential participants. Use of these ‘cultural interpreters’, whose ‘influence emanates . . . not from traditional but from charismatic authority’ (Homan, 1991: 84), introduces concerns about the voluntary nature of consent, since once approached by a well-liked or well-respected intermediary, prospective participants may feel hard-pressed to refuse. Accordingly, interviewers and gatekeepers alike were reminded in their preparation for recruitment to focus on the human rights of participants whose dignity, well-being, and privacy should always trump our desire to include them in our research. Most importantly, they were reminded in our team meetings and interview debriefings that the distribution of power between researchers/gatekeepers and marginalized populations is inherently inequitable. Once we establish trust, participants become vulnerable because they are relatively unaware of the ‘representational consequences’ of the stories and images that they share (Shankar, 2016).

Following each interview, the research team conducted preliminary analyses of transcripts to develop follow-up questions that sought clarification or elaboration of meaningful life events for the second and third interviews. This fluid and collaborative approach to interviewing built on the prior knowledge and reactions to emergent data by the researchers, advisory group members, and outreach coordinators.

Participants

Our participants were 19 immigrant older adults: 9 in Vancouver and 10 in Montreal. Through purposive sampling, we selected participants aged 60 or older. To limit the potential for culturalist explanations of phenomena—whereby cultural perceptions, beliefs, or attitudes are blamed for limited access to resources, for example—we opted to maximize diversity in the sample. We further aimed to include communities that have been underresearched in Canada and elsewhere (Koehn et al., 2013), that is, Afghanistan, Chile, Columbia, Guyana, North and South Korea, Nicaragua, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Trinidad and Tobago. They further represented intersecting and multiple social locations such as ‘racial’/ethnocultural affiliation, language, socioeconomic status, gender, time and mode of immigration, and place of origin and current residence.

Such diversity presents considerable challenges of interpretation and translation. Seventeen participants were interviewed in their language of origin, in which they could most comfortably communicate. Interviews were conducted in six different languages (Dari, English, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, and Urdu) and consent forms were translated accordingly. The same interpreter was engaged for each of the three interviews and used simultaneous interpretation in the presence of the researcher, interpreter, and participant. One of our transcribers, a research assistant in Montreal, was fluent in Korean and Spanish and, while transcribing interviews conducted in Vancouver in those languages, was able to clarify the meaning expressed by participants when the interpreters’ ability in the moment was limited. One interpreter was an experienced interviewer and hence conducted the interview alone in the participants’ mother tongue. Translation was then completed at the point of transcription. In all cases, interviewers and transcribers debriefed immediately after each interview to discuss ambiguities, and memos were added to the transcript. These memos informed coding and analysis of transcripts.

Three phases of data collection

We adopted a multiphased interview process that entailed three distinct interviews and allowed participants and interviewers the time and space to develop shared trust and understanding. Distributed over several months, this protracted engagement between participants, interviewers, interpreters, and, at times, other family members provided space in which to account for nuances based on commonalities or differences in social location, language, and ‘in the moment’ interactions and relationships. Our three-phased approach (Figure 1) allowed us to focus on individual life stories, as well as the structured relations that shape later life, and encompassed both past and present. The interviews, all of which took between 90 and 120 min, took place at a location of the participants’ choice (their home/community agency/university office).

Figure 1.

Three-phased approach to research.

Phase 1—open life story narrative interview: Participants were encouraged to talk openly about key experiences that have shaped their later lives. We began our discussion by drawing a line on a piece of paper and asking participants to think about this as their lifeline. Most people chose to begin their stories with their birth and early family life, although they were free to define the parameters of their tale, and subsequent events often emerged more organically. They were asked to add major life events to the line, which were re-storied chronologically after the first interview as a tool for clarification and elaboration during the subsequent interview. Drawing from Grenier’s (2012) work on late life transitions and ruptures across the life course, the intention of this exercise was to visualize and encourage in-depth discussions of meaningful life events. Participants were asked to signify the impact of these events (whether positive or negative in some way). This structured lifeline was compared with thematic descriptions emerging from the interview in our iterative analysis process and served as another visual tool (alongside photographs) in the final photovoice exhibit.

Phase 2—focusing on structural determinants of aging and photovoice preparation: After the research team transcribed and briefly analyzed the first interview, we conducted a second interview with the participant. The interviewer first summarized the themes extracted from Interview One in relation to the participant’s lifeline. Participants then reflected further on the stories they had shared with the assistance of the interviewer who queried how ‘the state’ has shaped their life course. Drawing on previous work conducted by the study’s investigators, the line of questioning and analysis focused on how the participants’ interactions with institutional structures such as the labor market, health care, education, and immigration have influenced their identities and ultimately their late life experiences. These data were later incorporated into the lifeline.

At the conclusion of this interview, participants were given a SONY Cyber-shoot 20.1 MP camera in preparation for the third and final interview. The interviewer provided training on how to use the camera as well as guidance on obtaining consent from third parties who may be subjects of their photographs. Based on the themes that emerged from Phase 1 interviews and consultations with advisory group members, we engaged participants in the codevelopment of a guiding question to focus their photographic efforts.

Phase 3—reflecting on photographs: After participants took photographs in response to the guiding question cocreated in Phase 2, the research team arranged for the third and final interview, which was typically between 3 and 4 weeks after the second. In alignment with photovoice methodology, the research team framed the use of photographs as a ‘political’ approach to research that aimed to encourage participants’ more active engagement in the research design, data analysis, and dissemination process. We explained how the photovoice exhibit aimed to bring together community groups, policy makers, and practitioners with the power to effect social change to improve the lives of affected communities (Wang and Redwood-Jones, 2001). Accordingly, we asked participants to consider what they would like service providers and policy makers to know about their experience and how that could be reflected in their photographs.

Ultimately, these images documented elements of their experience of aging in Canada, drawing on both the present and past (as, e.g. when they took photographs of photographs). Researchers then used the photographs to elicit narratives about their meaning, which often tapped into domains that the researchers had not anticipated. Together, participants and researchers identified 10–15 photos and corresponding narratives for inclusion in the exhibit. Different photographs were often selected by participants and research team members based on how they ‘touched’ them emotionally or the significance the picture had to a theme that emerged from previous interviews, for example. The coconstructive process of meaning-making between researchers and participants was evident in this process. Participants nonetheless exerted considerable agency in their insistence on the inclusion of images that illustrated what Shankar (2016) calls their ‘auteurship’: for example, an artful close-up of a decorative cabbage, the vibrant image of an expensive running shoe, and a carefully curated display of nursing implements, all spoke to the intent of the photographers to make an aesthetic impression.

Ethical considerations

This SSHRC-funded project received ethical clearance from the ethics review boards of both McGill University and Simon Fraser University, but we were aware that our ethical accountability extended beyond this formality. The researcher’s social status typically places them in a position of relative power vis-à-vis the participant. Remaining conscious of the potential for inadvertent manipulation is essential to the ethical conduct of such research. For example, the development of rapport engenders trust, which is essential to the success of qualitative research, yet

the efficacy of such skills may prove to be the researcher’s most insidious deception. We can only avoid such pitfalls if the potential for manipulation is understood. Moreover, even though they may have consented to their role in the research process, participants may not be fully aware of the means by which their privacy is invaded and are therefore . . . [limited in their capacity] to protect it. (Koehn, 1999: 30)

Our methodologies introduced further complications. For example, ‘informed’ consent presupposes that we forewarn participants of the content of our line of questioning. Yet many unanticipated topics can arise in the course of a life story such that the consent form can merely communicate the intent rather than the specific risks of the research project. To address both issues and minimize the risk of emotional distress, we adopted an ongoing consent strategy that entailed checking in with participants regularly to ensure that they were comfortable continuing with the interview. They were frequently reminded that they could withdraw without penalty or consequence at any point during the research process.

In anticipation of the possibility that sensitive topics may arise, we compiled a list of professionals and community resources. Interviewers were also prepared to advise participants about accessing mental health professionals should their interview trigger an emotional or psychological response. We did in fact connect some participants with community supports, as needed.

Confidentiality is especially difficult to guarantee when using photovoice. Our participants selected pseudonyms, and we were careful to remove from textual data any identifying information such as names and places or events that may jeopardize their anonymity and confidentiality. Consistent with ethical recommendations for this methodology (Wang and Redwood-Jones, 2001), participants exercised complete control over their selection of photographic subjects, as well as the topic and style of photographs they took. As a result, however, many chose to take photos of themselves, or other people, places, and things that revealed their identities, and in this sense, confidentiality and anonymity could not be fully guaranteed.

As photovoice gains momentum, some ethical principles have emerged, some of them better aligned to its use in research than others (PhotoVoice, 2014). Key among these is the importance of keeping participants informed and engaged in the decision-making process and ensuring that they retain a sense of ownership over their work. Additionally, the informed consent must be viewed as an ongoing process, discussed on a one-to-one basis. Thus, consent forms signed by participants and/or their photographic subjects in our study included both acknowledgement of the risk of identification and the option to withdraw consent to use their photographs at any time. Both clauses were discussed at length with participants. When we did not have permission from all subjects in a photograph selected by the participant (some of whom could not be reached), identifying features (e.g. faces) were obscured.

Analysis

The theoretical underpinnings of our study acknowledge the dynamic relationship between the individual and the social world. Accordingly, our efforts to understand how social structures influence the subjective experiences of the participants were complemented by an active process of reflexivity on the influence of our own social positioning on the data collection and analysis process.

Interviewers from both sites collaborated on the development of a ‘codebook’ to support the analysis process and to ensure consistency in analysis. The four theoretically modeled components of the intersectional life course approach¹ (Ferrer et al., 2017b) informed the codebook in relation to emergent themes in transcripts from the first two interviews from each site. Ultimately, codes were assigned to all materials associated with an interview including photographs. The lifeline visual enhanced analysis by representing meaningful life course events chronologically and along key areas including identity, relationships, structural oppression, and agency/resilience. Advisory groups and interpreters facilitated interpretation of some of the stories, particularly as we moved between communities with very diverse histories and contextual realities. In regular local and national meetings, we openly negotiated differences in opinion, perspective, and emphasis to ensure shared meaning and a sense of ownership and control over data collection and analysis. While research team members connected most frequently, advisory group members and interpreters were engaged at several points throughout the research trajectory.

All interviews were digitally recorded, and the English interpretations transcribed verbatim. Researchers and interpreters also read through the transcribed interviews to ensure fidelity of the translations. Analysis began once meaningful units of text were organized into codes, and areas of similarity and divergence among participants were recognized. Research team members labeled themes hierarchically (as parent and child nodes), according to the codebook, using qualitative data management software QSR NVIVO 10. This interpretive process, which included memo writing, allowed us to identify the primary themes emerging from the data. We used an interactive model of data analysis that cycled between data collection, data reduction (into stories, vignettes, etc.), data display (presenting both images and vignettes or interpretations to participants and the advisory group), and drawing and verifying our conclusions (with input from participants and advisory groups). Our analysis followed an iterative rather than a stepwise procedure, moving back and forth between participant stories, emerging concepts, and photographs. Careful attention was placed upon the development of a nuanced approach that is sensitive to the fluid and specific realties inherent to each subject.

Knowledge exchange: photovoice exhibit

Our knowledge exchange strategy centered on photo exhibits, launched simultaneously in British Columbia and Quebec, using duplicate sets of materials/findings from our study (see Figure 2). The exhibits were an astounding success, attracting over 150 people at each site. In addition to 19 individual portraits, and 6 theme boards, the exhibits included 3 introductory panels describing our objectives, theoretical framework, and methodology and an explanation of how to walk through the exhibit. All lifelines and stories were presented in English and/or French and, most importantly, in the original language of the interview. The translated panels were appreciated by participants and their families who could read stories and themes with ease and marked an important demonstration of respect on the part of the researchers for the participants.

Figure 2.

Our photovoice exhibits in Montreal (photo taken by Eric Yang Zhao, 11 May 2017) and Vancouver (photo taken by Aman Chandi 11 May 2017).

To simultaneously recognize the unique narratives of our participants, as well as the broader social forces that connect them, we employed multiple methods of data presentation. Individual portraits included the participant’s lifeline (to account for migration trajectories and meaningful life events), a brief summary of their narrative, and three photographs. Our preliminary analysis of cross-cutting themes represented the collective accounting of experience as shaped by structures identified within the intersectional life course. We agreed on six, each of which featured one to two photos and relevant examples from each of three to six individuals whose stories were used to illustrate the theme. Community Engagement, Family and Care, Housing and Transportation, Precarious Employment, Trauma of the Past, and Resilience stood out as important, but we have since identified other relevant themes, such as Social Isolation, that we have developed into presentations and manuscripts. While one mode of data presentation could not in and of itself account for all four components of the intersectional life course, the combination of individual lifelines, individual narrative summaries, and collective themes effectively illuminated the linkage between individual life events and structures and processes of domination and agency.

We identified these themes as preliminary because we were committed to launching the photo exhibit close to the end of the data collection process to ensure ongoing engagement with participants, advisory group members, and their communities. Often, in traditional research projects, emerging findings only reach the intended audience (whether scholarly or community) well after the end of data collection in order to allow time for researchers to complete their analysis and to come up with recommendations and conclusions. As a collaborative and activist project, our aim was to continue to engage communities and stakeholders in an ongoing process of analysis and action; hence, we chose to display our preliminary ideas rather than present outcomes at the end of the project. This created space for the development of recommendations and next steps with our collaborators and various stakeholders.

While challenging for some research team members more accustomed to including recommendations and conclusions in knowledge dissemination activities, the process of thinking through policy recommendations proved to be an important and affirming exercise. We invited those attending the photo exhibits to write their reflections on the project and suggestions for social change on feedback cards (see Figure 3). We received more than 200 responses across the two sites. This decision to present our findings in their ‘raw form’ for people to witness, to identify as more or less meaningful and relevant, and to recommend next steps thus proved to be a central feature of our project.

Figure 3.

Feedback cards from our exhibit.

Many participants told us that they felt proud of their achievements and resilience in a way they had not previously considered and that they had discovered things in common with older racialized immigrants from other countries who had shared similar life experiences, bringing them together in ways they had not thought possible. Participants and their families related several stories indicating the significance of the project for them: one told us that she had never divulged her early life and migration stories to her daughter prior to the exhibit, fearing that her experiences of discrimination would create an emotional distance between them and leave her vulnerable. The exhibit thus facilitated connection and communication. Finally, since the first event, the photo exhibit has evolved into other knowledge mobilization opportunities, particularly in British Columbia which has an active and relatively well-funded multiculturalism agenda. In Vancouver, the photo exhibit was extended and later staged at several different organizations and the catalog has even been used to teach English as a second language in a local community organization.

Lessons learned: strengths and challenges for consideration

Our methodological application of the intersectional life course perspective presented both breakthroughs and challenges. Next, we discuss our project’s successes and tensions.

Working across diversity: intersections in action

Finding the balance between focusing work on a researchable subject and attending to intersectionality is challenging. To avoid culturalist reification, one must commit to a research praxis that engages across different identities and social locations including but not limited to culture, country of origin, time and type of immigration, gender, economic status, region, language, and so on. While this leads to interesting possibilities for analysis, the process does require additional resources and budgetary considerations, as well as space for community engagement and reflection. Issues such as outreach and recruitment, trust building within underrepresented communities, and translation and interpretation all demand considerable attention.

Extended outreach was necessary in cases where no previous relationships existed. This meant working on the ground and engaging reciprocally with communities and potential participants for whom research is not well known or is mistrusted. In some cases, we provided individual support to participants related to government pension entitlements or housing concerns to enhance trust. Prolonged engagement with communities, the development of advisory groups, and the hiring of outreach coordinators and interpreters—not just as employees but as active decision makers in the project—were important tools used to support diversity and power-sharing in the research process and outcomes.

Tensions between coconstructed narratives: moving between oppression and agency

We found that ‘living’ intersectional life course theory was both fascinating and difficult. Finding a balance between the search for oppression and agency in the data is a central goal for researchers committed to exposing structural oppression and their links to the lived experiences of marginalized people. However, establishing equilibrium between the two can be a source of tension: while researchers tend to focus more on structure and interpretive macro-level experiences, participants speak intentionally about their micro-level experiences. In practice this meant that while the researchers sought to focus more attention during data collection on questions related to structural oppression, most of our participants across sites chose to move beyond issues of social exclusion, placing emphasis instead on their triumphs over adversity. As a result, we had to modify our initial coding book template, which initially included many more categories of exclusion than any other.

The participants’ emphasis on their agency was especially apparent when they were invited to cocreate guiding questions for their photographs and to take photographs independent of the researchers. Participants photographed and explained their relationships and commitments to family, roles related to intergenerational and transnational reciprocity, activities that brought meaning to their lives (including activism and support to new immigrants), faith as a strength, and their love of nature. Sharing decision-making power in this way resulted in valuable new insights and perspectives that would have otherwise been lost in the pursuit of pre-existing theoretical ideas.

Multiple methods (tools) for multiple ways of knowing

Using multiple data collection strategies that included phased interviews and photography arguably enhanced the capacity of participants to tell their stories in their own voices. We found that this multilayered approach allowed us to engage deeply with participants through time and space. The interviews and photos offered connection between past, present, and future and facilitated discussions related to moments of trauma or difficulty in relation to triumph or resilience and agency. Although we had initially hoped to focus the photographs on participants’ interactions with the institutions and policies that have shaped their experiences of aging, they instead offered a method of diffusing and reciprocating power.

Conclusion

Theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the experiences of multiple marginalization that include ageism, racism, and sexism are often absent in both mainstream and ethnocultural gerontology research and practice. An intersectional life course perspective that considers the mutually compounding intersections between the multiple identities and oppressions that accumulate over a lifetime to define peoples’ experiences of aging signals the way forward. This work must be situated not only within time, but place, exploring the unique patterns of immigration, healthcare access, and aging in immigrant-receiving countries such as Canada. Our paper offers a methodological framework that merges life story narrative and photovoice to operationalize the intersectional life course approach. It is designed to capture the complex and intersecting identities of older adults and expose the often-invisible institutional structures and relationships of power that mark older adults’ interactions with family, community, and the state in their everyday lives. This methodology has the capacity to both deepen our understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized older adults and map the intersections of identity, social location, and structural discrimination across the life course.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to our advisory group members who represented the following organizations in British Columbia and Quebec: Vancouver Coastal Health, West End Seniors’ Network, South Granville Seniors, MOSAIC, Canadian Centre for Elder Law, City of Vancouver Seniors’ Advisory Council, United Way of the Lower Mainland, Immigrant Services Society of BC, Alliance des communautés culturelles pour l’égalité dans la santé et services sociaux (ACCESSS), National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada, Le Réseau FADOQ, and l’Appui Montréal. We are especially indebted to the immigrant older adults who gave so generously of their time to share their stories and photographs, and to the interpreters and data collection staff whose skills are apparent in the quality of our data.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support for this research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (430-2014-00506) and the Centre for Research and Expertise in Social Gerontology (CREGES).

ORCID iDs

Shari Brotman

Sharon Koehn

Notes

Author biographies

Shari Brotman has worked extensively as an educator, researcher, and practitioner in the fields of social gerontology and antioppression social work practice. Her research centers on questions of access and equity in the design and delivery of health and social care services to older adults from marginalized communities and their caregivers using qualitative, community, and arts-based methods.

Ilyan Ferrer’s research focuses on the intersections of aging, im/migration, labor, and care experiences of racialized communities in Canada. His work incorporates intersectionality, oral history, and antioppressive social work theory and practice.

Sharon Koehn trained as a medical anthropologist, applies an intersectional equity lens in her community-based research with immigrant older adults on the social and cultural dimensions of health, health promotion, and access to health care and social supports.

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