Reconstructing the Social Image of Older Women and Ageing: The Transformative Power of the Narrative Set in the Local Context (original) (raw)
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Systems and Empowerment Sciences for Lifespan Development (SYSTED) steering committee, 2023
This article shows how students in Swedish higher education are being trained for future social work (e.g., practitioners and professionals working in elderly care). Their training consists of carrying out a social service evaluation of the needs of the elderly. The students complete a written task that largely mimics the investigation process used by social services in their effort to provide aid. In this way an assessment of the students’ various abilities is carried out and the students’ formulations and descriptions of an older individual are revealing. The empirical material is based on students’ evaluations of cases (the cases are constructed by teachers). These are written within the framework of university courses in social work. The results show that students use categorizations based on their ideas about age and aging. The article problematizes and discusses whether the descriptions can be considered reasonable in relation to the decisions that are then proposed by the students, thus highlighting ageism. It also appears that the educational context, within which learning is designed, can be influenced and that higher education could consciously raise these issues in a relevant way.
2018
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) predictions, it is expected that 20 per cent of the Australian population will be over 65 years old by 2034 (McDonald, 2016: 65). This means that work with older people will continue to be an enormous area of growth for everyone working in human services or social policy development. To ensure that the attendant rapid growth in needs for care and other services does not result in increased marginalisation, social exclusion and oppression of this increasing demographic, social workers are well positioned to take a lead role in recognising and applying practices that do not oppress older people. It is the aim of this paper to explore how social work students can learn about practice and knowledge that aims to free older people from institutional and societal oppressions. Good practice and good policies in working with older people must be underpinned by strong theoretical understandings of the social, economic, institutional and lega...
ATTITUDES OF SOCIAL WORK STUDENTS TOWARDS THE AGEISM
The Journal of International Social Research , 2015
Ageism which is a concept first used in 1969 by Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, can be defined as "a process of systematic stereotyping and discrimination against people because they are old" (Butler, 1995: 35). Turkey's population is growing older and the elderly constitutes an important target group especially in terms of the social work profession. Therefore determining the causes of discriminatory attitudes towards the elderly is extremely important in terms of quality of services provided to the elderly. Starting from this view, the aim of this research is to determine the attitudes of social work students towards the ageism in Turkey and the sociodemographic characteristics that affect these attitudes. The research population consists of social work students in all active departments of social work in 20122013 academic year in Turkey; the sample consists of 990 social work students from different universities such as Hacettepe, Selçuk, Ankara, Adnan Menderes, Bakent, Yalova, Kocaeli and KTO Karatay. 610 of the participants are female and 380 are male. The research data were obtained by using personal information questionnaire which is developed by the researchers and the “Ageism Attitude Scale” which is developed by Vefikuluçay Yılmaz and Terziolu (2011: 267). As a result of the study, female students have more positive attitudes than male students in the “restricting life of the elderly” sub-dimension of Ageism Attitude Scale; students who are 21 and older have more positive attitudes than students between the age of 17 and 20; students who are in the first grade have more positive attitudes than students in the third and fourth grade in the “negative ageism” sub-dimension; students who say that elderly relatives are important in their lives have more positive attitudes than others in the “restricting life of the elderly”subdimension and students who have taken a course on old age have more negative attitudes than students who didn’t have any courses about it. In conclusion, when considering Turkey has started to increase the proportion of elderly in the population, it is important for social workers, which is one of the occupation that undertake the task of planning and providing services for the elderly population, to be informed about old age and to improve the skills for working with the elderly.
TRUE TO AGE, TRUE TO GENDER - WHAT ADULT EDUCATORS AND PROGRAMME DEVELOPERS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT OLDER WOMEN’S GENDER CAPITAL, SOCIAL ISSUES AND VALUES, 2021
The handbook is designed for educators and educational programmes developers, who work with or train older people. Nowadays, their task is not reduced solely to the transmission of disciplinary knowledge and their role is not limited solely to the facilitation of their learners’ learning. They should empower older learners whenever possible by including their gendered capital in the programme, by addressing gender equality, by pointing at old age and denigrating social stereotypes about old age and gender. In this respect, values and remarkable models of conduct from the past or the present become key components in designing educational activities for stimulating older people to become more actively engaged in the community. The handbook has been developed as a part of the Erasmus+ project True to Age, True to Gender and tackles, within its seven modules, topics like: the social engagement of older people, European values and equal rights, gender issues, age and gender stereotypes, the development of educational programmes for older people, promotion of ICT methods among older learners.
Towards a Pro-Elderly Social Work Curricula
Active Ageing: Dynamics in the Post Modern Era, 2019
Studies on old age has been gaining momentum in academic circles in the past few decades owing to many reasons including a higher demographic dividend of elderly population globally, often termed as population ageing or greying of population. The need for focusing on the elderly population is often stressed by higher education committees and commissions. Social work, being a socially committed profession, has always focused on working towards the welfare of the marginalised sections of the society and hence has given due importance to geriatric social work education and practice. This paper attempts to analyse how the idea of old age studies or geriatric social work is dealt in the academic curricula of various universities of India. The thrust areas of focus include necessity of geriatric social work in the curriculum, how old age is portrayed in the curriculum, the nature of terminologies used to describe old age, and if the curriculum is pro-elderly. For this purpose, randomly selected curriculum of universities from different regions of India has been assessed. The study concludes that despite repeated highlighting of the importance of including elderly studies by higher education authorities the curriculum in most universities need reappraisal in context of the changing global scenario. Thus, the study tries to locate the strengths and weaknesses of the current curricula and hopes to bring insight regarding the same.
Gerontology & geriatrics education, 2015
Recently there has been an increase in the population of older adults; however, this increase has not been reflected in the helping professions. The aim of the present study was to qualitatively investigate barriers to working with older adults within the human service professions. An online survey was sent to students, academic faculty, and practitioners from the disciplines of social work and psychology throughout Australia, addressing issues related to work with older adults. Thematic analysis was used to extract themes and subthemes from the responses (N= 252). The most important finding was that a barrier to working with older adults appears to be a consequence of a perpetuating cycle among students, academic faculty, and professionals collectively. Faculty members did not feel knowledgeable in the area of gerontology, and were therefore not able to educate students in this area appropriately, leading to students to enter the workforce as either faculty members and/or practitio...
Older women and their representations of old age: a qualitative analysis
Ageing and Society, 2012
ABSTRACTIn this article we shall be analysing the representations of old age and ageing made by three generations of older women with different life stories (single, married, children and childless). Our principal findings, based on a qualitative analysis of 25 in-depth interviews conducted with three generations of older women (65–74, 75–84 and 85 and older), mainly reveal their reluctance and even refusal to define themselves as ‘older or elderly women’, largely due to persistent stereotypes linking old age to dependency, social isolation and fragility. Aware of the social prejudice regarding women and old age, they reject it unanimously. Older women represent a challenge to these homogenising preconceptions of old age, which they, on the contrary, experience in a multitude of ways, often enjoyable. Their conceptions of ‘ageing well’ are diverse and do not correspond to a clinical definition of ageing. Their representations of ‘ageing well’ and of ageing express positive values of...