Older people as researchers: Evaluating a participative project
A review of a research project into older people’s views on services, which involved older people themselves as researchers.
Increasingly, older people’s experiences are considered essential in examining the quality of services they receive. In this project older people not only participated in research but were themselves the researchers. This publication follows their experiences as they step beyond the traditional role of ‘consultee’ to those of interviewer and researcher.
The report is an account of learning by doing – of discovering what research is and how to do it; of learning from theory and from experienced researchers. It sets out the practicalities of undertaking research, together with the pitfalls and the lessons learnt. The authors place the experiences of older researchers in the wider context of policy development.
How older people became researchers: Training, guidance and practice in action examines related issues.