The Nursing Home Community: A Critical Ethnography
A nursing home is a community of care ideally designed to provide seniors with a safe and supportive environment in which to receive around-the-clock evidence-based healthcare and ancillary services. Nursing homes are also complex environments, with the residents comprising one distinct social cohort and staff another, with evident hierarchies and roles within the organization. An ethnographic approach to the nursing home community lends insight into the relationships between various parties and stakeholders in the community. Furthermore, the ethnographic methods permit unique qualitative, phenomenological insights into the lived experiences of both staff and residents. Through the window of ethnographic research, it may be possible to recommend changes to nursing home care delivery and improve client perceptions, experiences, and outcomes. Critical analysis of nursing home ethnographic research reveals several primary insights into the structure and culture of the community. Although diverse, the nursing home community demonstrates the importance of ritual and routine in promoting social cohesion and conformity.
Throughout this semester I have applied the tools and principles of ethnographic research to the nursing home community setting as both observer and participant-observer. I used ethnographic methods like in-depth interviews and systematic observations to gather data and interpret findings in light of recent empirical research. The literature reveals the importance of ethnographic methods in nursing home care contexts, especially as unearthing qualitative data helps researchers, policymakers, healthcare administrators, and all other stakeholders “assess such intangibles as quality of life in a nursing home,” (Henderson and Vesperi 2). As a result of the growing integration of ethnography into nursing home research, the concept of “nursing home ethnography as a distinct genre” has ensued, bolstering the efficacy of multidisciplinary empirical research (Henderson and Vesperi 2). At this stage it also becomes important to differentiate between nursing homes in particular and other senior living facilities including assisted living, hospice, and independent living communities (Diamond 1288). Interviews with staff members and administrators revealed the great diversity even within each of these categories, with different nursing homes aspiring to different missions and visions and offering clients various areas of specialization in their locus of care.
While technically an outsider to the nursing...
Works Cited
Diamond, Timothy. “Social policy and everyday life in nursing homes: A critical ethnography.” Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 23, No. 12, 1986, pp. 1287–1295. doi:10.1016/0277-9536(86)90291-1
Harnett, Tove. “Seeking exemptions from nursing home routines: Residents' everyday influence attempts and institutional order.” Journal of Aging Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4, Dec 2010, pp. 292-301.
Henderson, J. Neil and Vesperi, Maria D. The Culture of Long Term Care. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995.
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