Late Additions
Crowdsourcing from the Beneficiaries: Involving Older Adults in Providing Insight on Social Policy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elena Frolova, Veronika Malanina
In times of big data researchers often prefer large samples as a field and structured surveys as a tool. Still, small focus groups involved in less structured communication provide insights on policy changes The Wellbeing Lab at Tomsk Polytechnic University has experience in bringing together older adults as one focus group and social workers as another to address the same issue relevant to the elderly wellbeing. In course of the group work participants are asked to give their intuitive personal assessment of the degree of some issue (loneliness, participation, social policy) among older adults on a scale ranging from “critically low” to “critically high”. At the second stage, participants define variables relevant for assessing the issue being considered and give their assessments. Then, the participants are asked to define and discuss factors, contributing to the issue considered and range them in order of importance. Individual ratings of factors are then translated into overall ranging. The final stage involves elaborating solutions to the problem. The methodology suggests that multiple expert seminars on the same issue might be run to collect as many expert assessments as possible. We have run three coupled expert seminars on social policy, participation in society, and loneliness. All three issues received different assessments and appeared to be perceived by older adults and social workers from different angles. This study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (project №19-18-00282)
Improving Long-term Care for the Elderly: A Multi-level Framework for Inter-sectoral and Organisational Collaboration
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Virginija Poskute, Rūta Kazlauskaitė, Irmina Matonytė, Lineta Ramonienė
Rapid ageing of Western societies is leading to an increasing demand for long-term care (LTC) services for the elderly, which stands out as a major challenge and risk, and calls for immediate action. The situation is even more critical in Southern and Eastern Europe where social norms towards filial responsibility for old parents are still strongly rooted and where informal care for the elderly prevails, as many of these countries are also facing depopulation and changes in the family structure and life-style (more single people, less children per family, higher divorce rates, increased migration, etc.). A close collaboration among all key stakeholders across all the sectors stands out as an imperative in meeting LTC needs, improving and sustaining service quality and reducing public costs. Such cooperation is increasingly becoming commonplace; nevertheless, it is facing multiple challenges. Research on inter-sectoral and organisational collaboration in LTC is thus divided in regards to its effectiveness and calls for strategies for its successful implementation. In this paper we offer a multi-level framework for key stakeholder collaboration in LTC organising and delivery. We develop this framework on the results of a mixed-method research conducted in Lithuania: a key stakeholder survey (N=280) and focus group discussions (eight discussions, 54 participants). Our framework includes a number of national, organisational, and individual level factors that are proposed as enablers of enhanced and sustained key stakeholder collaboration in LTC organising and delivery.
