Enjoying the third age! Discourse, identity and liminality in extra-care communities

Abstract

Extra-care housing has been an important and growing element of housing and care for older people in the United Kingdom since the s. Previous studies have examined specific features and programmes within extra-care locations, but few have studied how residents negotiate social life and identity. Those that have, have noted that while extra care brings many health-related and social benefits, extra-care communities can also be difficult affective terrain. Given that many residents are now 'ageing in place' in extra care, it is timely to revisit these questions of identity and affect. Here we draw on the qualitative element of a three-year, mixed-method study of  extra-care villages and schemes run by the ExtraCare Charitable Trust. We follow Alemàn in regarding residents' ambivalent accounts of life in ExtraCare as important windows on the way in which liminal residents negotiate the dialectics of dependence and independence. However, we suggest that the dialectic of interest here is that of the third and fourth age, as described by Gilleard and Higgs. We set that dialectic within a post-structuralist/ Lacanian framework in order to examine the different modes of enjoyment that liminal residents procure in ExtraCare's third age public spaces and ideals, and suggest that their complaints can be read in three ways: as statements about altered material conditions; as inter-subjective bolstering of group identity; and as fantasmatic support for liminal identities. Finally, we examine the implications that this latter psycho-social reading of residents' complaints has for enhancing and supporting residents' wellbeing.

Using longitudinal qualitative research to explore extra care housing

“…She said that these residents "don't take part … we don't get any new faces because they seem to want to stay in their flats." Similar findings have been highlighted in other studies (see West et al, 2017).…”

“…In common with previous research on ECH (Callaghan, Netten, & Darton, 2009;West, Shaw, Hagger, & Holland, 2017), the changing mixture of residents living in ECH was a topic that most participants talked about. Many of the participants at sites A, B and D thought that new residents were moving into ECH with higher and more complex needs than they had done previously.…”

“…The impact of changes in the wider national and local policy contexts was evident in the data we obtained from interviews. For example, residents and staff referred to the higher levels of need of incoming residents, reinforcing evidence from previous studies of ECH and residential care homes (see for example West et al, 2017). Policies in England have tended to emphasize keeping people in their own homes for as long as possible and this has led to higher levels of disability among care home residents.…”

‘You have got to stick to your times’: Care workers and managers’ experiences of working in extra care housing

“…The financial and demographic pressures facing local authorities have, in some areas (including Area 1), resulted in changes to the eligibility criteria for publicly funded ECH, directly impacting the nature of care needs among ECH populations (Skills for Care, ; West, Shaw, Hagger, & Holland, ). The increasing prevalence of those living with dementia places additional demands on the organisation of care.…”

Interdependence, commitment, learning and love: the case of the United Kingdom's first older women's co-housing community

“…Under the weight of such socio-cultural expectations of individual identity-and riskmanagement, there are no guarantees that age-segregated communities are any less 'age-denying spatial orders' (Katz and McHugh 2010: 271) than age-integrated environments as authors such as Katz and McHugh (2010) and Blaikie (1999) have observed in the context of North American retirement communities and others in the context of Extra Care retirement communities in the UK (Biggs et al 2000;West et al 2016).…”