Abstract
ABSTRACTExtra-care housing has been an important and growing element of housing and care for older people in the United Kingdom since the 1990s. Previous studies have examined specific features and programmes within extra-care locations, but few have studied how residents negotiate social life and identity. Those that have, have noted that while extra care brings many health-related and social benefits, extra-care communities can also be difficult affective terrain. Given that many residents are now ‘ageing in place’ in extra care, it is timely to revisit these questions of identity and affect. Here we draw on the qualitative element of a three-year, mixed-method study of 14 extra-care villages and schemes run by the ExtraCare Charitable Trust. We follow Alemàn in regarding residents' ambivalent accounts of life in ExtraCare as important windows on the way in which liminal residents negotiate the dialectics of dependence and independence. However, we suggest that the dialectic of interest here is that of the third and fourth age, as described by Gilleard and Higgs. We set that dialectic within a post-structuralist/Lacanian framework in order to examine the different modes ofenjoymentthat liminal residents procure in ExtraCare's third age public spaces and ideals, and suggest that their complaints can be read in three ways: as statements about altered material conditions; as inter-subjective bolstering of group identity; and as fantasmatic support for liminal identities. Finally, we examine the implications that this latter psycho-social reading of residents' complaints has for enhancing and supporting residents' wellbeing.
Highlights
Background to the researchThis paper draws on the qualitative element of a three-year, multi-method study, whose overarching aim was to investigate the health and wellbeingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
ExtraCare, as an organisation, came into being in the late s as a response to the paucity of housing and care choices for older people. It is one of the largest providers in the United Kingdom (UK) of what is more generically referred to as extra-care housing, a particular type of retirement community, which aims to meet ‘the housing, care and support needs of older people, while helping them to maintain their independence in their own private accommodation’ (Netten et al : )
Discourse in extra-care communities wellbeing advisor (nurse), carers or family, researchers contacted interested residents by telephone to discuss the study and arrange a meeting
Summary
Background to the researchThis paper draws on the qualitative element of a three-year, multi-method study, whose overarching aim was to investigate the health and wellbeing. This group of liminal (Grenier ) residents (between independence and dependence), a (sizeable) minority among our participants, represent a growing cohort of residents in ExtraCare and other extra-care communities, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.
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