Abstract
The demand for care homes appears to be emerging as a key future trend in response to the burgeoning population of older adults, with the need for care provision increasing accordingly. Life quality, happiness and well-being are important factors associated with the care of older residents. This qualitative study explores how older adults moving into care homes view their life quality, from their own perspectives, in two quite different cultural contexts, Chinese and Danish. Older care residents in Shanghai and Denmark participated in the study by means of semi-structured and in-depth interviews. An interpretive phenomenological analysis approach was used for data analysis. Four interrelated themes were identified: positive transfer; positive environment; positive capability and positive experience. The findings demonstrated that older adults considered their quality of life as the result of a dynamic process. Their pursuit of a harmonious status, centered on “change” as the core value, which encompassed both the simplicities and complexities of life. Both older adult groups cared more about their emotional wellbeing, which focused mainly on positive emotions being stimulated while negative emotions were shunned. In the situations when they were “harmonized” by society systems, there was an important emotional thread which continued throughout their whole life that was strongly associated with life quality which was the relationship with family members – be it in the past, present or future.
Highlights
The burgeoning population of ageing older adults is well recognized
Older residents were asked about their perceptions of the quality of life in care homes, and a prevailing theme that emerged was that a positive attitude when transferring into a care home appeared to have a positive impact on their life quality after their relocation
A positive attitude was considered by most participants as the most difficult to maintain, and necessary and meaningful, as it might be conducive to the subsequent adaptation to their “new homes”, as well as to their positive psychological state
Summary
The burgeoning population of ageing older adults is well recognized. In China, by 2050, the number of adults over 65 years old is projected to account for 26.9% of the total population, according to a recently announced report (National Statistical Bureau of the People’s Republic of China, 2019). Institutional-based care has been the dominant form of long-term care for the elderly who need care the most in western nations, whereas this is a growing tendency in China (Feng et al, 2011) The rationale behind this can be an increased dependency on others due to a decline in cognition, the prevalence of acute health crises (Johnson & Bibbo, 2014), insufficient provision of specialized care in community-based settings (Kao et al, 2004), and a disproportionate decrease in the reliance on the traditional home-based informal care which engenders new forms of outside assistance to be explored. These have been viewed to be as a result of profound demographic shifts and socioeconomic changes (Gu et al, 2017) – the shrinking proportion of the younger generation, as well as the burgeoning of small nuclear families and “empty-nest elders” (Chu & Chi, 2008; Feng et al, 2011)
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