Centre for Policy on Ageing



Interviewing vulnerable old people — ethical and methodological implications of imagining our subjects
Author(s)	Cherry Russell
Journal title	Journal of Aging Studies, vol 13, no 4, 1999
Pages	pp 403-418
Keywords	Isolation ; Loneliness ; Interviewing ; Methodology ; Australia.
Annotation	It is sometimes argued that interview research with vulnerable social groups, such as frail, lonely, older people, has distinctive ethical and methodological requirements. The conventional one-off, professional interview is seen to be both inadequate as a method of data collection and inimical to the interests of research subjects. While ideologically persuasive, such a view is not derived from systematic analysis of actual interviews. The author describes an Australian research project on social isolation, in which the conceptualisation of interviewees as "vulnerable subjects" had a number of critical but intended impacts on the course and outcomes of the research. The author offers an empirically grounded analysis of the relationship between social representations of older people and the methods used to study them. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-000120219 A
Classmark	TP: DV: 3DL: 3D: 7YA
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.