Ruth Lowndes

Meaningful social engagement in everyday activities can enhance resident quality of life in nursing homes. In this article, we draw on data collected in a multidisciplinary, international study exploring promising practices in long-term care homes across Canada, Norway, and Germany, to investigate conditions that either allow for or create barriers to residents’ social participation. Within a feminist political economy framework using a team-based rapid ethnography approach, observations and in-depth interviews were conducted with management, staff, volunteers, students, families, and residents. We argue that the conditions of work are the conditions of care. Such conditions as care home location, building layout, staffing levels, and work organization, as well as governing regulations, influence if and how residents can and do engage in meaningful everyday social life in/outside the nursing home. The presence of promising conditions that facilitate resident social participation, particularly those promoting flexibility and choice for residents, directly impacts their overall health and well-being.

This chapter explores how we approached and conducted creative team interviewing during this multiyear ethnographic study of long-term care homes. We discuss interviewing from the theoretical standpoint of feminist political economy and feminist and interpretive interviewing. We outline our creative team interviewing method, as well as identify examples of what worked well and the relational, spatial, and temporal challenges we addressed. The chapter’s final section offers critical reflections on our contributions to creative team interviewing. Specifically, an explicitly feminist orientation in our research enabled us to use interviewing to pay attention to the everyday realities of the work and care in long-term care settings. Feminist political economy enabled us to see and hear experiences from nursing homes in context and in relation to others who live, work, and visit.

The final chapter identifies some critical lessons learned during an eight-year project. Many in the team had worked on large grants and/or on ethnographic studies. Developing a new version of ethnography, however, required creative teamwork. So did moving beyond narrower forms of interdisciplinary and international research and more traditional approaches to mentoring in order to ensure collective, consultative, reflexive, as well as continuous knowledge creation and sharing. This chapter argues that such creative team work depends on building relationships and on organizing meetings that are stimulating intellectually and move the research forward. Those meetings must also be fun. Creative team work also requires significant preparation for the site visits, especially when those visits are intense and involved highly vulnerable populations. It means mentoring through sharing the entire research process in egalitarian ways. Finally, it means thinking about what happens to the team and the data after the funding ends.

Mealtimes are among the busiest times in nursing homes. Austerity measures resulting in insufficient staff with heavy workloads limit the amount of time available to assist residents with eating. Within a feminist political economy framework, rapid team-based ethnography was used for an international study involving six countries exploring promising practices and also for a study conducted in one Canadian province in which interrelationships between formal and informal care were investigated. Data collection methods included interviews and observations. In addition, dining maps were completed providing a cross-jurisdictional comparison of mealtime work organization, and illustrating the time spent assisting residents with meals. Dining maps highlight the reliance on unpaid care as well as how low staffing levels leave care providers rushing around, preventing a pleasurable resident dining experience, which is central to overall health and well-being.