Crossing Age and Generational Boundaries: Exploring Intergenerational Research Encounters

Abstract

Academics and professionals who aim to understand and plan for aging societies are most often younger than study participants and the benefactors of social programs themselves. However, the appropriateness of such intergenerational practice is beginning to be questioned. It has been suggested that only older people should conduct research, consult on and plan programs for older people. To understand the benefits and pitfalls of such an approach, research encounters between younger and older people will be used as examples from which to explore the question: what happens when individuals attempt to reach across age and generational boundaries? Situating age and generation as organizing principles, insights will be gleaned from the anthropological insider-outsider debate, linguistic work on age-based differences, and emotional associations and identification across age and generational boundaries. This paper argues that the ways older and younger people relate to each other may hold the potential for connection and/or conflict between the generations. Results suggest that age and generation be considered one of the many social locations that may impact the research process and outcomes. Researchers and policy makers of all ages must begin to reflect on their involvement with age and generational boundaries.Academics and professionals who aim to understand and plan for aging societies are most often younger than study participants and the benefactors of social programs themselves. However, the appropriateness of such intergenerational

Intergenerational Relations: Themes, Prospects, and Possibilities

“…Building on these definitional issues, Amanda Grenier (2007) next discusses the complexities of age and generation within the research encounter. Issues of age and discrepancy in experience between participant and interviewer are rife in psychological study.…”

“…For example, research conducted with children has these problems inherent in its design, as researchers are necessarily of a different age and generation than the child participants. While our measures, instruments, and methods provide us with indirect access to the experiences of the child, we view the results of these operations through the interpretive lens of our own generational norms, values, and experiences—a phenomenon that child development researchers might informally refer to as “adultocentrism.”Grenier (2007) uses the intergenerational research focus, and especially the topic of research with the elderly, to address this issue. She points out that interpretations of both participant and observer experience within this encounter are contingent on understanding the ways that age and generation affect the encounter itself.…”

Doing age: methodological reflections on interviewing

“…Theories are stories in themselves, write Kenyon and Randall (1999:2). They are also often privileged stories that raise questions about who is doing the writing (Grenier, 2007). My theoretical thinking was post-structuralist, and, while it would not be accurate to claim that the participants' perspectives on the world were fundamentally different by necessity, we had at least different vocabularies.…”

“…In the narrated events the school was an important context, as were different discourses on old age and society. In the narrative events, however, the interview situation constituted the prime context; it was the stage on which the research project acted out its preconceptions (Grenier, 2007) and a meeting between two persons in which positionings based potentially on age or other identities and sympathies were made. The extract below is taken from the first fifteen minutes of the interview.…”

Precarity in late life: rethinking dementia as a ‘frailed’ old age

“…It is viewed as a liminal space and an event horizon -a location that holds the negative or less than ideal experiences of aging (Grenier 2012, Gilleard andHiggs 2010). Falling into this space of the 'fourth age' therefore, frailty and dementia occupy sites that are laden with associations of physical and cognitive deficits, dependence and burden, pity or weakness (see Grenier 2007, Pickard 2014). …”