thirteen - Ageing, fiction, narrative exchange and everyday life

Summary

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the development, engagement with respondents and analytical results of the ‘Fiction and Cultural Mediation of Ageing’ project (FCMAP) that was part of the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA), a UK cross-Research Council initiative. From its inception FCMAP sought novel ways to access the opinions of older subjects about the facts and experiences of ageing in a manner that radically diminished any influence over (or implicit guidance given to) its selected respondents, and that could thereby generate interesting and informative qualitative data, which was self-reflective on the part of those older people who formed a broad sample approached through various strands, as described below. The FCMAP team of researchers came from areas of scholarship concerned with a combination of literary studies, history and social narrative, and so our initial set of questions set out to explore how, with regard to older people within such a research project, one might address:

• • Thinking about narratives of ageing, considering issues regarding their social exchange and influence through attitudinal research rather than researcher opinion (or presumptions).

• • Developing methods of engagement with, and analysis of, such narratives in their social context while in circulation without recording or transcription by the research team itself (again, which method might potentially introduce at least implicit bias).

• • How to obtain robust and significant qualitative data concerning such active narratives where respondents were as uninfluenced as possible (apart from each other in discussion groups on which they could reflect).

The primary aims of FCMAP were to seek to comprehend how representations of ageing circulate in culture and society and were reflected on by older subjects (being the subject of such narratives on the part of others). In one strand the research team considered that elective readership of relevant contemporary fiction and the respondents’ own diary entries might facilitate a purposeful critical interaction undertaken by older subjects concerning such symbolic representations and life experiences simultaneously. The team sought to develop locations or sites where this might take place. We next considered that a close analysis en masse of records of such interactions might potentially facilitate some radical thinking about current social attitudes and behaviour with regard to ageing and its attitudinal reception (how people perceived both themselves and how others regarded them), both on the part of the respondents and the research team.