published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

This work offers a cross-cultural account of the “aging experience” for elderly in two regions of Bulgaria. It is an ethnographic study that explores the importance of sustained and new (or adapted) interpersonal relationships for elderly in a depopulating Northwestern Village and a small Southern Town and its surroundings in the Rhodope Mountains. Highlighting relationships with family, peers, and neighbors, the study documents how the elderly negotiate and strategize their well-being in spaces and networks increasingly occupied by members of their same age group and despite adversity such as permanently depleting populations. These elders manage to engage in creating and maintaining their networks for instrumental or salient support; participate in peer memberships and interactions for coping and belonging; and negotiate valued and new cultural and socioeconomic strategies and places for well-being. The study’s focus engages with theories of aging; psychosocial, anthropological, and sociological knowledge; and cross-disciplinary conceptions of how groups of people mediate relationships and issues affecting them. It underscores some Bulgarian elders’ engagement over disengagement, their nostalgia and coping, and pathways that lead to innovation and resiliency. The study also offers further insight into topics such as “aging in place” and the complexities of human experiences within a Bulgarian context that considers specific histories and processes such as post-socialism and out-migration. As such, the current work contributes to explorations of engaged and adaptive elders aging in place (particularly in relationship to out-migration and economic forces); to how overlapping histories and experiences create membership within age-cohorts; and on the ways that the elderly cope, adapt, and innovate when traditionally salient family networks are stretched because of economies, depopulation, or distance. Finally, this work occurs against the backdrop of an aging and depopulating landscape. Issues affecting Bulgaria and its elders include population loss and stages of demographic decline, declining or low fertility rates, and an increasingly aging population across the country but more so within villages. These and other problems have resulted in the elderly expressing isolation; feelings of loss; and economic, social, and personal woes. It has also resulted in the elderly being categorized as a particularly “vulnerable” group within the country, a term which runs the risk of placing them within a realm of complacency or marginalization. Even in extreme situations, many of the elderly I met in Bulgaria remained resourceful and resilient by sustaining or adapting relationships and practices, by creating moments and spaces for coping and companionship, and to meet their need as “still alive” in ways that challenge perceptions of vulnerability or marginality.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-63). Also available on the Internet.

In response to the anthropological literature on old age and ageing that remains largely isolated from more contemporary anthropological theory, this thesis re-focuses anthropological attention on the experiences of ageing. Towards this end, I examine the way macro- (history, politics, economics) and micro-level processes (social relations, intergenerational relations, local contexts, individual histories) intersect to frame the cultural construction of old age, personal experiences of "being old", and the self. A central point of intersection between these processes comes from the recent history of social transformation in my fieldsite, Dodworth, a former coal-mining village. Since the late 1980s, this is an area that has been grappling with the rupturing effects of the closure of the coal-mining industry. Attending to these conditions and how they inform the everyday reality and the experiences of ageing and of the self are critical concerns in this thesis. My approach to the ageing self is one that privileges narrativity and temporality as key constitutive elements and which considers the potentially different position of older people in relation to time and to the self. Growing older is a complicated mixture of bodily and social change, and negotiating these shifts has crucial implications for one's sense of self and subjectivity. While "old age" is a category which is readily used in daily discourse and living, what old age is and who is old nevertheless resists anchoring. What old age, being old and ageing meant to my research participants are key questions in order to understand the experience of growing older in Dodworth. Throughout the thesis, I focus on the dialectics of interpersonal interactions in order to speak meaningfully about how the experience of old age is organised and constructed. Emerging in tandem with these issues is another major topic of this thesis: social memory. Talk in Dodworth about places, absences, and relations continually brought the past and present together and was involved in how a sense of self is created. What emerged was a three-dimensionality of memory, an individual and collective way of placing oneself and others in relation to spatial aspects of the villagescape.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-63). Also available on the Internet.

The use of online communication media has increased dramatically over recent years, with people from different age groups becoming users of online communication media. Many scholars have become interested in how online communication media influence or even reshape people's social networking practices and social networks. Most existing studies on the impacts of online communication media are based on the observation of online practices of the general population or the younger population, while older adults are rarely taken into consideration. An increasing number of elderly people have become active users of online communication media and they may differ from younger people in many aspects such as networking strategies. Studying the elderly population may therefore enhance our understanding of the utility of online connectivity. Based on 35 in-depth interviews of elderly WeChat users in urban China, which were conducted between December 2017 and March 2019, this study considers two major questions: (1) How do older adults use online communication media to network with their different social relations? (2) How do the online networking practices of older adults influence their social relations? The analysis focuses on two major issues to answer the second question: accessibility and the relational intimacy of social ties. By considering these two questions, this study aims to determine whether older adults become "networked individuals" or just stay "alone together" when they become active users of online communication media. My findings show that how elderly people use online communication media to interact with their social ties is different from younger users and their unique networking strategies have different digital impacts on their social relations. Elderly people often lack opportunities to socialise due to their age-related conditions. Online communication media can reduce their costs of manage social ties and serve an important channel to help many elderly users to (re)connect and develop their social ties, enhancing both the accessibility and relational intimacy of those social ties and help them to become "networked individuals"

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By making use of the virtual community, older netizens can accumulate and maintain their social capital in various ways: namely, improving their self-identities through online collective problem-solving; developing collective identification with the community through sharing collective memories with their peers online; exchanging intellectual capital for social resources offline during their social engagement; providing emotional support to their net friends; and increasing the density of their networks of social relationships through interacting with their net friends both online and offline. / Data collection is mainly based on ethnographic work, including online and offline participant observation between September 2008 and July 2009. The data collection was later supplemented with semi-structured in-depth interview (on 37 OldKids members) and textual analysis. When analyzing how the virtual community interacts with older netizens' social capital, the study introduces a theoretical framework that, illustrates the acquisition of social capital on its cognitive, behavioral, structural and relational dimensions. / Existing literature reveals that netizens augment their social capital upon joining social networking sites. But most studies focus on analyzing youth behaviors, neglecting older adults, who are often labeled as laggards in taking up new technologies. Because social capita is a resource which can be mobilized to provide network-mediated benefits beyond the immediate family; it is especially important for disadvantaged groups (i.e. older generation) who lack social support. In Chinese society, older adults' social capital shrinks dramatically after their retirement; therefore it is of practical significance for this study to explore how virtual communities provide older people with opportunities to regain and enhance social capital. / This study also reveals that the online roles and social status of the older netizens, together with the external social context of OldKids website, influence how the virtual community influence social capital. In other words, social capital does not distribute evenly among virtual community members. The netizen who takes on more active and responsible roles can accrue more social capital than other members. / This study reveals that OldKids virtual community and its offline communities (OldKids club and OldKids salons) act as platforms and at the same time are driving forces for the older netizens to develop their social capital: it provides them access to cyberspace through encouraging knowledge sharing online and designing offline computer training for the elderly; it encourages its members to shape collective memory through organizing ritual-like online and offline activities; it facilitates members' social engagements by obtaining resources from local government and traditional media; finally, it promotes the flow and exchange of members' social capital resources between online and offline communities. / Under the background of worldwide aged tendency of population, this thesis explores how virtual communities provide social resources to disadvantaged groups. Using the OldKids website (headquartered in Shanghai, China) as a case study, the research investigates how this virtual community assists its members to mobilize social capital, a valuable productive resource inheres in social relations. / 吳歡. / Adviser: Anthony Y. H. Fung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-01, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-301). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English, partial text includes English translation. / Wu Huan.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work