Subject

In this research the aim was to find out how old age and health are discussed by people who themselves are seen and treated as old. Its focus was to study these people’s talk about their experiences of old age and health. While I do not believe that other people’s experiences are directly available for us to discover, it is still important to analyse what kinds of elements are included in people’s talk about their experiences and in their self-identities. This information will help gain a deeper understanding of how “being old” and health are perceived by those people who may see themselves, and who are seen and treated by others, as ageing or old.

The focus of the research was to identify the different perspectives raised by people in their talk and to find out how those perspectives were used in talk. The research questions were concerned with how people defined old age and being old as a social position, in relation to other people and in the context of one’s own life entity, and with what meanings health received in this context. I was particularly interested to learn how people talked about their own and other people’s chances to influence their health and ageing, and whether they felt that people were responsible for their own health. The theoretical framework for the research was underpinned by social constructionism and the discursive perspective, which entail the idea that talk is action. The datasets consisted of biographical interviews with people aged 90 or over and group discussions in which the participants were 70 years or over. The main tools of analysis came from discourse and rhetoric analysis. These ! methods made it possible to study how diff erent arguments were used in talk to explain, defend and legitimate one’s own decisions and actions as well as other people’s actions.

The research findings showed that it is too simplistic to talk about the experience of old age in terms of denying age or resisting negative stereotypes of old age. Rather, older people have various ways of thinking about and defining old age and health. Being old is an ambivalent position. Mobilizing the category of old age in talk about oneself seemed to make the agentic position problematic. In their talk about old age and health, the people in this study balanced between different views and ways of talking. I called these different ways of talking the decline, activity and wisdom discourse. Discourses are cultural resources that people use to construct meanings of old age and health and their own identity as old. In the decline discourse, the participants in this study constructed old age as self-evidently a time of poor health and losses, which serve to explain and legitimate ill health,dependence on other people and need for help. The activity discourse was used to construct old age as something the individual can choose and have an influence on. It was used to construct oneself as active, healthy, a needed member of society and independent. Within the activity discourse, health was constructed as something that is malleable by means of one’s own actions and as a matter of individual responsibility. On the other hand, the participants qualified the idea of responsibility by mentioning various factors that are beyond the individual’s influence. Talk about old age as wisdom was the “weakest” discourse in this data, possibly indicating that that there is little real support for the idea that old age is seen in society as a time of wisdom and that older people represent that wisdom. The most important discovery, however, was that these different discourses were used by the same people to give meaning to and construct their identities. These discourses were also contrasted with one another, but talk about old age is best described in terms of negotiation and renegotiation about one’s positions and the meaning of one’s own actions and decisions. Both old age and health talk involved moral argumentation. People’s talk revolved around chances to influence one’s own health and life in old age, and on the other hand, around the question of how far old age is a fate that is beyond individual influence.

I approached the interviews and group discussions as interaction situations in which both interviewer and interviewee are active participants. Individual interviews place more pressure on the individual interviewee. Health proved to be a particularly dilemmatic topic in this regard because of the heavy ideological and moral baggage it carries in contemporary western culture, and talk about one’s own health can present a threat to one’s face. A common concern in individual interviews was to explain and justify one’s own health-related choices and actions. Various discursive and rhetorical devices were applied to construct one’s own activity and good health. The research showed that the group discussions involved more negotiation between different views. Sensitive and conflicting views were also raised in group discussions. In other words this research did not support the view that group discussions are conducive to unitary views and discourage talk about sensitive issues. The social constructionist view on reality and social facts is that for analytical reasons, it is important to look at the meanings given to old age and health by older people themselves. This does not mean to say that social constructionist research ignores “social facts”, structures, bodily being or power relations. These, too, can be made a topic of analysis in order to see whether and how they become visible, are made a meaningful and important part of one’s own ageing. Rhetorical studies provide a powerful tool for exploring the argumentative basis of age categories and identities. Rhetoric analysis, importantly, pays attention to how talk about old age and health is a presentation of identity and a way of constructing an accountable and worthy identity. The particular benefit of this enterprise is that it allows us to study the arguments applied in making some versions of reality look more plausible or better and to ignore or “silence” other versions. Discursive studies have demonstrated their strength in showing how one and the same person can use diff erent and even conflicting age categories and discourses, and how the meaning of the topic at hand is constructed in interaction, negotiated and accepted or refuted. Both discursive and rhetorical analysis provide tools for studying the ideological and moral meanings of old age and health – an important topic in times when health seems to carry strong ideological and moral connotations, and when the growth of the elderly population is repeatedly brought up in public debate.

I see that constructionist and discursive studies have a crucial role to play in ageing research in addressing the different ways in which old age is made reality – physiological, political or experiential – and in studying what is achieved with different versions of reality. What kind of identities, politics, services, demands of individual conduct do they make appear natural, inevitable and reasonable, or alternatively, unnatural, avoidable, impossible and irrational? How is age used to classify and categorize people into different sites of everyday life? How individual and groups themselves use different age categories and whether and how these are linked to social and political rights and valued or devalued social positions? How category of old age is used either to enable agency or what type of reasons and justifi cations are used to curtail people’s potential? How do older people see their prospects of enacting agency? Some of the topics were approached in this study. All of these deserve further research.