‘Putting music on’: everyday leisure activities, choice‐making and person‐centred planning in a supported living scheme

Abstract

Accessible summary• Essential Lifestyle Plans are a good way for people with learning disabilities and their support workers to tell people about things they like to do, such as listening to music.• These plans also tell people about the things that they need, like what medicine they may need to take.• Sometimes it is not easy to put the things we like to do at home into these plans because there are lots of things we do every day.• People need to think carefully about how the things we choose to do at home can be put into Essential Lifestyle Plans that are written for us and with us. AbstractBackground: Person-centred planning, which commonly becomes formalised within services for people with learning disabilities through an Essential Lifestyle Plan (ELP), was intended to help place the choices of individuals at the forefront of service provision. However, beyond UK government policy rhetoric, scholars have raised issues regarding the capacity of person-centred planning to empower people with learning disabilities to make choices about various aspects of their lives. This article assesses these debates, paying attention to the relationship between ELPs and choices made in relation to leisure activities. Materials and Methods:To examine leisure activities and choice-making in depth, the article draws upon ethnographic research conducted with four adults living in a supported living scheme. It focuses upon their domestic musical activities, connecting data derived from participant observation with the contents of ELPs.Results:This study found that person-centred planning underplayed processes involved with articulations of musical choice and also the peculiarities of the settings in which choices were made. It also found that leisure preferences expressed in ELPs did not effectively convey the richness and sociocultural significance of everyday domestic musical activities within the supported living scheme.Conclusions:Person-centred planning should not be divorced from social context, relationships and differing degrees of dependency. Domestic leisure activities such ª

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“…Previous studies have identified similar negative experiences in community housing services, which supports the relevance of our findings for an international audience (Fisher et al. 2016 ; Fullana, Pallisera, and Díaz-Garolera 2019 ; Hassan 2017 ; Krotofil, McPherson, and Killaspy 2018 ; Wilken et al. 2018 ).…”

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