Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

nature of social relations. I was convinced that treating ageing simply as a biological fact
or a cultural construction said very little about the experiences of people living in longterm
care facilities. Focusing on these residents, I reminded myself during the early
period of my fieldwork that how these people made sense of and managed the
interchange between actual and perceived losses of independence (e.g. physical,
financial, self-care, etc.) and the relationships that emerged from these evolving
dependencies would be something to take note of.
Some other heuristic questions began to arise during my familiarisation with Tacoma
Pastures as a field site: Why was care so ineffective and made to seem complicated?
How did long-term care facilities become so accepted in the West in such a short period
of time? Furthermore, why was it that despite the majority of people’s fears and
apprehensions regarding long-term care facilities, why did people still constantly move
into them? This tension and anxiety commanded my initial research attention. Unlike
Gubrium, who fell into his ethnographic method unknowingly after familiarising himself
with Murray Manor and its residents over a brief period of time, I knew that I was going
to engage in a kind of ethnographic enterprise rooted in participant observation. But
even with this in mind, Tacoma Pastures had not yet become my field site. In order for
me to make sense of how Tacoma Pastures stood in relation to the rest of the
community, I knew I had to widen my field site in order to incorporate other social
groups, events and persons who were part of the larger context of ageing and caregiving
in society. This was not going to be a strict institutional ethnography.
Over the course of twenty-one months, I engaged in systematic participant observation.
For the first nine months, I conducted research and volunteered at Tacoma Pastures.
For the remaining twelve months of fieldwork, I continued my role as a social
anthropologist researcher, but now I was working simultaneously in Tacoma Pastures
as an official part-time caregiver. Over the course of my fieldwork, I conducted semistructured
interviews with Tacoma Pastures workers, residents and their family
members. Additionally, I ventured out of Tacoma Pastures and conducted research in
community senior recreation centres, sitting in on various caregiving support group
meetings—mostly geared towards persons with family members suffering from
dementia. I visited other long-term care facilities in the area, as well as attended
community presentations on elder law (e.g. touching on such topics as power of
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