Theorising Sleep Practices and Later Life: Moving to Sheltered Housing

Eileen Fairhurst

Sociological Research Online, 2007, vol. 12, issue 5, 214-224

Abstract: This paper re-analyses data from a study of older people and sheltered housing which combined textual analysis of professional discourse with interviews. There were only two references salient to ‘sleep’ in that paper and I offered no analytic comment upon them. At that time, then, sleep as a sociologically interesting topic, was, for me a taken for granted matter. It is that taken for grantedness that is examined here. On being invited to contribute to this special issue, I went back to the original data and interrogated it for ‘sleep’. I realised that, with this different concern, the texts and interviews contained much more about the ‘doing’ of sleep in later life than I had appreciated, especially where, when and how sleeping practices occur. Sleeping ‘upstairs’ or ‘downstairs’, in a single- or double-bed and on which side of the bed were all matters of relevance when older people were considering a move to sheltered housing. Older people's own sleeping practices are contrasted with those offered in texts produced by architects designing sheltered housing. The paper concludes by considering the methodological implications of re-analysing research materials for emerging sociological topics and by giving pointers to future research on sleep practices in later life.

Keywords: Later Life; Re-Analysis; Sheltered Housing; Sleep Practices; Upstairs/downstairs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.1555 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:12:y:2007:i:5:p:214-224

DOI: 10.5153/sro.1555

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().