Fieldwork Study

Traveling to some exotic part of the world to undertake an ethnographic research project would be exciting and different. However, I believe there are enough topics to explore and understand, enough options to be undertaken and questions to be answered to keep me right here in America. The inspiration for my analysis is based on a current personal experience. Presently, my husband and his siblings are wrestling with moving their 85 year-old mother to an assisted-living facility, as she is unable to continue living independently. She cannot take care of herself any longer, needing assistance to dress, to ensure she is eating right, to cut her meat at meals, to ensure she takes her medications, and a general need for 24-hour surveillance for her protection. This personal circumstance inspires me to study the new intentional communities that the elderly and frail are integrated into when they are moved to assisted-living accommodations.

I believe this would be a worthwhile study, because with the significant population of the aging Baby Boomer generation, there will be increased demand for intentional communities to help the Baby Boomers live and deal with their daily lives. All that can be learned to understand why some are successful and why some are not, is input into helping ready a large portion of the United States population for later life circumstances.

People who join this type of intentional community are brought together due to circumstance. They come from varied backgrounds and different everyday experiences. They have different values, traditions, and ways of thinking and behaving. They have to build new routines and meet new people while struggling with the sense of loss they feel in leaving their “old world” behind. Is their acceptance of their new home influenced by whether they planned ahead and voluntarily moved? Did their medical condition or family force the move against their will, and therefore impacts their acceptance and induction into the new community? Yet after the move-in, they begin, hopefully, to form new relationships with people in their new community. How do the new relationships and new groups within the community form? How deep do they get? Are there new rituals and traditions that get initiated which become meaningful? What about the old traditions, celebrations, and rituals; does the family keep those alive bridging the past with the present? Does family geography and frequency of visits affect acceptance? Do those who are happiest with the new living arrangement become that way because they find others and develop common interests, new rituals and traditions? Is that commonality based on or driven by age, gender, their belief systems, common verbal, customary or material interests, their values, common experiences, their medical conditions or something else? How do the members of this group communicate creatively? My approach to fieldwork would be observation and interviews. It would include the residents themselves, the care-giving help, the families and visitors to the facility that bring forms of celebration, culture and new interests to the residents. It would include visiting different facilities first locally, and then expanding out geographically dependent upon the results of the local study.

Folklore reaches groups of people who share personal connections. As I visited my mother-in-law’s facility this last Friday evening, a group of elderly, most in wheelchairs, sat in the living room/reception area around a piano and sang World War II era songs as a pianist, one of their own, accompanied them on the piano. These residents have formed a new, informal, folklore community. Based on common interests and maybe some of their old traditions, they have found creative ways to share together, possibly bridging or creating new traditions and rituals, like their Friday night sing-along.

This blog entry is my response to the Chapter Seven Reflection Question.