Research Design in Aging and Social Gerontology

Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods

Joyce Weil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315450148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

Research Design in Aging and Social Gerontology provides a review of methodological approaches and data-collection methods commonly used with older adults in real-life settings. It addresses the role of normative age-related sensory, cognitive, and functional changes, as well as the influence of generational cohort (age-period-cohort) upon each design. It discusses the role of older adults as true co-researchers; issues uniquely related to studies of persons residing in community-based, assisted, skilled, and memory-care settings; and ethical concerns related to cognitive status changes. The text concludes with detailed guidelines for improving existing data collection methods for older persons and selecting the best fitting methodologies for use in planning research on aging.

Features of Research Design in Aging and Social Gerontology include:

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• Descriptions and evaluations of a wide range of methodological approaches, and methods used to collect data about older persons (quantitative, qualitative, mixed, and emergent methods: photovoice, virtual environments, etc.)

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• Ways to match research questions to selection of method without a preconceived methodological preference or dominance

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• Real-world and applied examples along with cases from the gerontological literature

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• "How to" sections about reading output/software reports and qualitative-analysis screenshots (from ATLAS.ti) and quantitative (SPSS) output and interpretation

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• Pedagogical tools in every chapter such as text boxes, case studies, definitions of key terms, discussion questions, and references for further reading on chapter topics

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• Glossary of key terms, complete sample research report, and an overview of past methodological research design work in gerontology

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• Companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/Weil where instructors will find PowerPoint presentations, additional discussion questions, and a sample syllabus; and students will find flashcards based on glossary terms, a downloadable copy of the sample research report in the text, and links to data sets, related websites, further reading, and select gerontological journals

This text is intended for upper-level undergraduates and masters students in aging and gerontology as well as students in human development, applied anthropology, psychology, public health, sociology, and social-work settings. Health care professionals, social workers, and care managers who work with older adults will also find this text a valuable resource.

Part I
Getting Started

An Overview of the Aging Research Process

1
Introduction

This chapter creates the framework for the basic elements and approaches to gerontological research. It defines gerontology and aging research terminology and introduces the reader to key components of developing a research question or narrowing down a topic of interest. Journal articles, existing literature reviews, and freewriting are presented as ways to create a new research question or develop an existing question further. The chapter introduces the process of choosing a research philosophy and other key decisions needed to develop a methodological stance and research design.

What Is Aging Research?

Often, gerontologists get asked who they are and what they do. Gerontologists work in a field that is called multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and even transdisciplinary. They encompass many disciplines and multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks for doing research in the field called “gerontology.” Gerontology, or social gerontology, is the study of the biological, psychological, and social processes and changes that occur as part of aging and in older populations. Gerontology, though often used interchangeably, must be differentiated from the term “geriatrics,” which has a more biomedical focus. Geriatrics addresses the medical, biological, and health-related aspects of the aging process and older persons (Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, 2016; Robnett & Chop, 2015).

The contemporary definition of gerontology today stems from prior works. Tracing the roots of the concept is helpful in understanding and defining the term. The origins of gerontology, as a term, are traced back to the word’s more biomedical roots. In the United States, Élie Metchnikoff (1908) suggested gerontology as a study of aging as an accumulation of disease processes leading to death. Several researchers and physicians added to the medical application and expanded this term from early 1900s to the 1980s. They include L. F. Barker (1939), E. V. Cowdry (1939), Ignatz Nascher (1916), Nathan Shock (1947), several early Institutes of Gerontology, Ruth Cavan, Ernest Burgess, Robert Havighurst and Herbert Goldhammer (1949), and Elaine Cumming and William Earl Henry (1979). British counterparts in early gerontological terminology development include Trevor Howell’s Advancing Our Years (1953), Arthur Exton-Smith’s Medical Problems of Old Age (1955), and Peter Townsend’s Family Life of Old People (1957) and Last Refuge (1962). Gerontological coursework developed in the 1980s with the rise of the critical (advocacy-based) gerontology of Carroll Estes (1979), Meredith Minkler and Carroll Estes (1999), and Chris Phillipson and Simon Biggs (1998). Three now well-known terms contributed to the modern definition of gerontology. Robert Butler’s coining of “ageism” (1969) refers to discrimination or stereotyping based on older age. John Rowe and Robert Kahn’s (1997) application of their “successful aging” model added some conditions to aging well. Their model included the absence of disease and disability with high levels of physical, mental, and social functioning. Building upon C. Wright Mills’s (1967) sociological imagination (and its use of personal troubles and societal issues terminology) is the gerontological imagination. It is an “awareness [that] allows us to comprehend the links between biological, behavioral, and social-structure factors that influence human aging. It is by definition, a multi-disciplinary sensitivity to aging that incorporates the common stock of knowledge from the core disciplines engaged in research on aging” (Wilmoth & Ferraro, 2013, p. 327).

Overview of the Research Process: Developing a Gerontological Researcher’s Approach

Each researcher must embark upon his or her own work to add to the body of work in the field. The history and current definitions of gerontology are a starting point for the development of research agenda. Understanding one’s own view and basic research principles is the roadmap to generating or refining an age-based research topic. Gerontologists can employ a holistic approach to creating a research question.

Basic Principles

It all starts with a question. Research is, basically, a way or systematic process of seeking an answer to a question that arises in a gerontologist’s mind, experience, practice, or time in the field. It can be “blue skies” research or research for the sake of research, without immediate application. It can be applied research, research that seeks a solution to an everyday issue or to solve a practical problem. Earlier authors—such as Jan Sinnott, Charles Harris, Marilyn Block, Stephen Collesano, and Solomon Jacobson (1983)—have suggested applied research began with workers at the bedside of skilled-care or home-care agencies, senior centers, meal sites, or Area Agency on Aging’s direct contact with older persons. William McAuley, Rosemary Blieszner, Cynthia Bowling, Jay Mancini, Jean Romaniuk, and Laurie Shea called the distinction between applied and pure gerontological research “blurred” (1987, p. 7). For example, a researcher may want to address multiple issues. He or she may seek to do the following:

• Evaluate how something is done. How did the autobiographical writing group with centenarians work out? Impact the writers?
• Describe an experience or event. What is it like being a male caregiver to an older parent?
• Explore practice options. What is the impact of trademarked exercise groups or services on older adults?
• Generate new ways of thinking. How would older persons use visual images and photos to depict their worlds?
• Explore something that is bothersome in the researcher’s experience, training, or practice. Why are older people objectified? Painted with one brushstroke as “old”? Why the use of elderspeak in care settings?

Research questions are exactly that, questions about the issue that is of the researcher’s interest, or the phenomena he or she seeks to investigate, relayed to others in a statement. Research questions can arise from an organization in the aging network’s call to do research—e.g., for a Department on Aging’s need to do an evaluation of older service users’ satisfaction levels with an existing program to meet the Older American’s Act funding requirement. Research questions can examine conditions that are favorable for paradigm shift—e.g., test the climate for cultural change, or alter the way long-term care is provided to older persons.

Research question are aligned with a researcher’s methodology, or approach to research. A methodological approach is the way researchers use an underlying philosophy as a basis to conceptualize and design all elements of their study—from selection of theory to presentation of findings. It includes the researcher’s use of an underlying philosophy (worldview or epistemological perspective) that is the basis of the study’s design and his or her approach and relationship to participants. Methodology includes “a set or system of methods, rules, and principles employed by a given discipline that govern how research is conducted” that is broader than the method alone (Sullivan, 2009). This means that a researcher’s philosophical standpoint (positivist, constructionist, subjectivist, transformative, and pragmatist as defined in Table 1.1) greatly influences his or her methodological approach—as a

Table 1.1 Moving from Philosophical Paradigm to Research Design

Ask yourself	Relates to	Issues and decisions to make	Examples of specific designs
What is your view of reality?	the use of an underlying philosophy (or epistemological perspective) also called worldviews	Objectivism: objective, external reality exists and can be measured and tested.	Quasi-experiments
		Positivist: Bring a traditional “scientific approach” to study people. Studies are objectively generalizable and include causality. Mostly quantitative.
	Objectivism Constructivism Subjectivism	Post-positivist: use the scientific method (applied to human beings) with variables, hypotheses, and theory to quantify and explain reality.
		Constructionist: seeks to capture the way individuals construct or create reality. Research is centered upon participants’ views/ways of constructing meaning/ seeing their worlds. Origins in hermeneutics.	Participant observation, open-ended interviews, phenomenology, case study, focus groups, life review, narrative analysis
		Interpretive: acknowledges there are multiple views of reality (including those of the researcher and those “studied”), so the “participants” are the best at describing experience, events, etc., in their own lives.
		Symbolic interactionism: understanding how people attach meaning to their experiences in the world based on their interaction with society.
		Subjectivism: our views of reality are filtered/seen throughout subjective viewpoints or vantage points.	Participatory action research, critical discourse analysis
		Critical/transformative: includes power and political dynamics of oppressed/marginalized groups and societal influences upon these groups.
		Feminism: an inclusive approach to include women’s voices and intersectionality statuses—reflecting society’s role in creating gender-based social problems.
		Pragmatism: avoids reality/construction debates and lets the researcher apply methods in the real world. Not so much interested in getting at a universal truth or being linked to only one philosophy—the real goal is problem-solving. How the data and outcomes can help solve real-world problems.	Evidence-based, outcomes research processes
Are you beginning with theory to guide data? Or are you using data to generate theory?	the use of theory (to inform the process, or as something	Deductive approach: begins with theory or a framework and applies those to the data (once called “top down”).	Secondary analysis of data, hypothesis testing
	to be formed as a result of the research process)	Inductive: begins with data to generate a theory or framework (once called “bottom up”).	Grounded theory, qualitative methods
What is the purpose of your study in terms of data?	a decision about the approach (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods)	Quantitative approach: numerical data	See Chapter 2 for a decision-making process.
		Qualitative approach: textual data
		Mixed methods: a mixture of data types
Who is your sample?	research units (ranging from documents to people)	Consider the types of people, institutions, agencies, or societies you wish to study. What are your eligibility requirements for your sample? (Don’t think about the number needed in your sample here; address that once you have selected a method and specific type of design.)	See Chapters 4–8 for individual sampling by method....