Paper short abstract:

Elderly residential care is widespread yet under-examined. This ethnographic project looks at residents' experiences of dignity and wellbeing as embedded within interpersonal negotiations, turning to experience and stories to reveal complexities and contradictions in this taken-for-granted space.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of residential care facilities designed to meet new and dynamic needs of a growing retirement population. While research on these facilities is abundant, research with residents remains underdeveloped. Research on older adults can reproduce stereotypes of "the elderly", and consider older recipients of care as objects of research, rather than as people who mutually produce understandings of experience. In order to ensure that services meet the actual needs of this population, we need to understand the experiences of residential care from the perspectives of care recipients. This ethnographic research project is designed to engage the experiences and perceptions of residents themselves, focusing on personal relationships and intimacy, and exploring the ways in which socialisation is a navigated negotiation between actors within the context of residential care. This study nuances the notion of dignity and wellbeing in the residential care setting, looking at the co-constructions that produce and complicate residents' experiences of care.