Wellbeing in retirement villages: Eudaimonic challenges and opportunities

Abstract

A retirement village consists of a collection of privately owned or leased flats or maisonettes for elderly adults that are supported by a central hub that provides catering, medical care and social activities. There have been studies of the psychological experience and impacts of such environments, however, there is lack of research that links the retirement village experience to overarching theories of eudaimonic wellbeing, and that uses qualitative methods to find out Wellbeing in retirement villages: Eudaimonic challenges and opportunitiesThe landscape of supported accommodation for the elderly in the UK has changed radically over the past two decades. One of the forms of residence that has increased in prevalence over this time is the 'retirement village' model (Grant, 2007). In a retirement village, elderly residents either own or rent a self-contained apartment or maisonette within a larger community that contains facilities such as dining, leisure and care services. A monthly or annual fee is paid to the community provider for access to these services (Robinson, 2012).In 2009, the BBC published a report that suggested that 25,000 older adults lived in a retirement village on that date 1 , and that number is likely to have increased markedly since then, as villages continue to be built all over the country. The lower age limit for entry into a retirement village is typically set at 55 or 60, but the average age is around 80 (Evans, 2009).Retirement villages are a relatively new social milieu that are likely to be different in their effects on wellbeing and identity, compared with more traditional forms of elderly care environment, due to the greater emphasis on autonomy and on an absence of reference to being a 'care' home. The current study aims to explore how living in a retirement village within the UK is personally experienced by residents as impacting positively and negatively on eudaimonic wellbeing, using Ryff's taxonomic model of wellbeing as an orientating framework. Eudaimonic wellbeingWellbeing is a complex construct that has been operationalized in different ways by psychologists and sociologists. Broadly, these different definitions can be categorized as and satisfaction, and in psychology this has been operationalized in the construct of 'subjective wellbeing' (SWB) (Bauer & Park, 2010). SWB contains the emotional dimensions of happiness, the balance between positive/negative affect, and the cognitive dimension of life-satisfaction (Daatland, 2005). In contrast, eudaimonic wellbeing originates in Aristotelian philosophy and is concerned with optimal experience and functioning in a broader sense than the hedonic type, including positive relationships, a sense of purpose, meaning, and a feeling of growth, as well as the hedonic cognitive-affective appraisals of happiness and satisfaction. In psychology, the eudaimonic conceptualization has been operationalized in psychological wellbeing (PWB), by Ryff (1989). Hahn and Oishi (2006) found that older adults who were asked to recall the "...

‘An ant against an elephant’: Retirement village residents’ experiences of disputes and dispute resolution

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“…Well-being is a central concept in positive psychology, over the last decades a lot of researchers focus their efforts to conceptualize and transfer it into practice. Two main directions have emerged in operationalization of the wellbeing construct: hedonic or eudaimonic (Chandler, Robinson, 2014). The hedonic approach views well-being as a state of subjective pleasure and satisfaction and its` been referenced as subjective well-being (SWB) (Bauer, Mcadams, 2010).…”

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