Suchergebnisse

The last edition of the Journal carried an introduction to retirement communities. Hartrigg Oaks is a non‐profit‐making community, developed without government subsidy, developed by the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, and has become well‐known among those interested in different housing and social care for older people. Modelled on American continuing care retirement communities (CCRC), this retirement village has recently been the subject of a three‐year evaluation (Croucher et al, 2003). This article gives information about Hartrigg Oaks, and some of the findings of the evaluation.

The White Paper Valuing People said the aim for people with learning disability should be choice of where and how you live. This is rarely the experience to date. A publication has been written for family carers, social workers and others who want to find out more about the various housing and support options for people with learning disabilities. It explains the choices, how to go about getting housing and what support people can find. Six individuals and their families allowed us to describe their different ways of creating housing and support arrangements. It was prepared by Nigel King and Sarah West of Housing Options for the Mencap City Foundation.

The two previous articles set out a typology of extra care housing and support for older people, and outlined funding. The last in the series describes how to decide if a frail elderly scheme is required, what model is most needed and in which location.The process of reaching a decision on the need for some form of extra care provision is essentially, first, an analysis of the supply of specialist housing and support provision and services, and second, an assessment of demand and trends for these services in a defined locality.

This is the second of a series introducing ideas about extra care housing for older people. Extra care models and new 'retirement communities' are becoming an alternative to residential care and traditional sheltered housing. The first article offered a typology for extra care, illustrating many different models. This second is about modelling capital and revenue funding. The third is on land and building development issues.

This year's Reith lectures focused on older people and questioned the inevitability of the ageing process. One lecture was to an audience of older people living in an 'extra care' scheme focused on activity and health ‐ 'adding life to years'. In a specially commissioned series of articles, Nigel King explains how extra care models and new 'retirement communities' are becoming an alternative to residential care and traditional sheltered housing. The first offers a typology for extra care. The second will be about modelling the care services, and the third on land and building development issues.

Dyadic interviews, in which two participants are interviewed together, are becoming more popular in qualitative research, but are much less discussed in the methodological literature than individual and group forms. In this article, we consider the nature and value of dyadic interviews, recognizing them as active, relational encounters, shaped by what all parties bring to them, and infused with issues of power. Drawing on our research on altruistic motivation which involved 47 dyadic interviews conducted with 94 individuals and post-interview feedback from participants, we demonstrate the strengths and point out some of the potential pitfalls associated with the dyadic format, focusing on the practical and ethical issues in defining and recruiting dyads and the practice of conducting such interviews. We provide recommendations for researchers interested in using this method, and suggest research priorities for the further development of dyadic interviewing.

The use of diagrams to stimulate dialogue in research interviews, a technique known as graphic elicitation, has burgeoned since the year 2000. Reviews of the graphic elicitation literature have relied on the inconsistent terminology currently used to index visual methods, and have so far drawn only a partial picture of their use. Individual diagrams are seen as stand-alone tools, often linked to particular disciplines, rather than as images created from a toolbox of common elements which can be customized to suit a research study. There is a need to examine participant-led diagramming with a view to matching the common elements of diagrams with the objectives of a research project. This article aims to provide an overview of diagramming techniques used in qualitative data collection with individual participants, to relate the features of diagrams to the aspects of the social world they represent, and to suggest how to choose a technique to suit a research question.

There is a need for individual‐level research into innovation, which departs from the traditions of mainstream creativity research. A working definition is given which enables innovation to be distinguished from creativity, and a qualitative study, examining individual experiences of innovation, is described. Unstructured interviews were carried out with 27 people in managerial or professional jobs, eliciting descriptive accounts of individual experiences of innovation at work. Transcripts of these interviews were content‐analysed, and the findings are discussed here under three headings: facilitators and inhibitors of innovation, reactions to innovations, and strategies for the management of innovation. Implications are drawn for future research in this area.