Place-Making through Media: How Media Environments Make a Difference for Long-Term Care Residents’ Agency

Sarah Wagner
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Sarah Wagner: Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 08860 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Societies, 2022, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: This paper explores the unique relationships care home residents have with communication media. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic case study at a long-term care site in British Columbia, Canada, I describe how care home residents’ everyday media practices are intertwined with their negotiations of longstanding attachments and new living spaces. The research draws connections between the spatiotemporal contexts of media use and residents’ experiences of social agency. Long-term care residents in this research were challenged to engage with the wider community, maintain friendships, or stay current with events and politics because their preferred ways of using communication media were not possible in long-term care. The communication inequalities experienced by care home residents were not simply about their lack of access to media or content but about their inability to find continuity with their established media habits in terms of time and place. While most research about communication media in care homes has been intervention oriented, this research suggests that long-term care service and funding policies require greater attention to create flexible, diverse, and supportive media environments.

Keywords: older adults’ media practices; older adults’ media biographies; long-term care; social isolation in later life; social agency; person-centered care; information and communication technology (ICT); life course perspective; communicative ecology mapping; focused ethnography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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