Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

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)