Two years ago, Monash sociologist Dr Barbara Barbosa Neves and a group of researchers included an acclaimed Australian author as part of their team looking into loneliness among residents of Australian aged care homes.
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Barbara Barbosa Neves
Senior Lecturer, Sociology
The key question, with Miles Franklin winner Josephine Wilson on board, was: "How can we better understand and represent their complex voices and stories?"
Now, the unique research project is updated and extended, with illustrator-artist Amanda Brooks joining. The result, published by The Gerontologist journal, is sociological academia, but with creative non-fiction and comic book-style art.
"We give participants space and time to talk about what they feel, and how they see the world," says Dr Neves.
The first paper two years ago focused on a sociological technique called "crystallisation" - "a multi-genre approach to study and present social phenomena" examining the "ethics of representation, which is critical when engaging with vulnerable populations" to "deepen the understanding of a topic by analysing and describing it in different forms, while resisting conventions regarding how findings should be presented".
The technique was first described by US sociologists Laurel Richardson and Laura Ellingson in the 1990s while exploring ideas of merging personal narratives with research. The method also asks for reflection on researchers' roles, and how participants' voices are represented.
Dr Neves wrote about this "crystallisation" phase of the research for Lens, citing global estimates between 35% to 61% of older people in aged care feeling lonely, a considerably higher figure than for those living in the community, and reports of more than 40% of aged care residents in Australia not getting any visitors - before the pandemic.
