A cog in the wheel or an agent of change: Knowledge use and practice with older people who are abused in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

Across the past three decades a growing national and international concern about elder abuse is evident in policy, research and social and health care practice. There is currently a considerable body of literature on prevalence, predictors and risk factors as well as debates about definitions, conceptualisations and appropriate legal, policy and practice responses. There is more limited research on how the conceptualisations of ageing and elder abuse shape professional practice. Knowledge use and social work practice in elder abuse in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand is the focus of this thesis.This thesis presents a qualitative exploratory study of elder abuse practice as reported by twenty social workers engaged in frontline elder abuse work throughout Aotearoa/New Zealand. The purposive sample of social workers practised in a variety of settings and were situated in different geographic locations across the country. The primary focus of this study is to explore how elder abuse is understood, how cases of In individual semi-structured interviews, participants were asked to describe their understandings of elder abuse, to explore the knowledge they use to inform these understandings, and to give details about what actions they take when encountering situations of abuse.An interpretative, social constructionist approach to this research was taken. All twenty accounts of practice were analysed thematically. This provided a means by which the processes of, and influences on, meaning, knowledge use and response-making could be scrutinised, and an understanding of elder abuse practice in Aotearoa/New Zealand could be discerned.The findings indicate that the term 'elder abuse' is universally recognised and articulated in practice, but when explored in depth, understandings about what constitutes elder abuse varied, were dependent on the knowledge individual social ii | P a g e workers brought to their practice, and on the context in which the practice occurred. This knowledge was not always explicitly used and consequently was often left unscrutinised. The use of tacit knowledge was seen to facilitate the establishment of patterns of practice that have become customary and are left unchallenged.The influence of the context on what could or could not be done to respond to elder abuse was acknowledged by many of these social workers. Beyond the immediate resource constraints that were recognised as limiting their options to address abuse, the significance of the socio-economic-historic-cultural-political context and how this informed and shaped social work practice (and the experiences of older people) were not readily identified by most. When these factors were noted, they were largely considered to be insurmountable.The findings from this study highlight that a narrow approach is taken by most of the social workers in this study when working with older people who are abused. There is little demonstrated understanding the socio/political context in which the abuse occurs, and the systemic issues that may co...