The broad aim of this research project was to u nderstand how old age is experienced by New Zealand senior citizens in their local and national communities and to provide a theoretical and social policy context for their stories. Old age is understood as a social construct and citizenship as a social practice mediated by individual biographies, by access to opportunities for participation and by social policy.
Until recently both geront91ogical research and professional assessments have been focused on the examination of a narrow range of dependency needs rather than on what older people themselves wanted "from health and social service agencies, and from life in general" (Gearing and Dant, 1 990) . It has been argued that the meaning of older people's lived experiences has often been ignored , and that they have been denied a role in defining their own needs (Gearing and Dant, 1 990; Wilkin, 1 990; Phillipson and Walker, 1 986; Ng, Weatherall , Liu and Loong, 1 998) . I n the 1 980s and 1 990s, however, earlier functionalist perspectives which had viewed old age as a social problem were increasingly challenged by writers who viewed the structures and attitudes of society as constructing the problem (Phillipson , 1 982; Phillipson and Walker, 1 986; Walker, 1 982, 1 996; Kendig, 1 986; Bond and Coleman, 1 990; Arber and Ginn, 1 991 ; Ginn, 1 993; Saville-Smith , 1 993; Hazan, 1 994; Biggs et ai , 1 995; Higgs, 1 997; Else and St John , 1 998; Keeling, 1 998a, 1 998b, 1 999; Ranzijn and Andrews, 1 999; Joseph and Chalmers, 1 996, 1 998, 1 999; Thorns, 1 993, 2001 ; Minichiello et ai, 2000) . These critical perspectives have emphasised various socially constructed aspects of the experience of ageing, the political economy of ageing and the geography of ageing, focusing on the social networks and the arrangements that create or remove barriers to the inclusion of older people in the life of their societies. Biographical approaches (Bornat, 1 989, 1 994; Gearing and Dant, 1 990; Coleman , 1 994) , in seeking to contextualise the ageing process, have contributed to the struggle to understand societal changes and "how older people have managed to get by, to respond to challenges and to cope with crises" (Peace, 1 990, p. 1 6) , as wel l as to the development of ways of allowing older people to tell their own stories through the research process.
During the same period, particularly the 1 990s, theories of citizenship began to address various structural barriers to social inclusion based on differences of race, gender, class, sexuality and culture (Lister, 1 997; Castles, 2000; Joseph, 1 999) . Contemporary discussions of citizenship emphasise the need to include all citizens in "a common way of life" (Parker, 1 998, p. 1 96) , seeing citizenship not as a legal status but as "a form of identification, a type of political identity: something to be constructed , not empirical ly g iven" (Mouffe, 1 992, p . 231 ) . Citizenship, in this view, is performed (Joseph, 1 999) , constructed through the networks of relationships in which people are "embedded" and "the multiple plots of family, nation or economic life" (Somers, 1 994, p . 624) .
Taking this view of citizenship as a narrative construction, my focus in this project was on asking older people to talk about their own lives in a way that would generate an understanding of their capacity for citizenship rather than focusing on the dependency and d isability that has dominated much of the research on ageing . My study aimed to find out about the meaning of senior citizenship in New Zealand by inviting older people to take part in a series of group discussions about their own experiences of ageing in order to shed l ight on the interplay between personal biography, social policy, societal constructs of race, class and gender and the shared experiences of a particular cohort. The research aimed to explore experiences of ageing, and to what extent they are consistent with an ideal of citizenship. A further aim was to test a method which could be used both to generate data to answer the research q uestion and to offer older people opportunities for participation by enabling them to tell their stories. This chapter will describe the nature of the research question , the research design and the methods chosen to explore the question, the theoretical justification for those choices, the research process, including data collection and data analysis, and the ethical issues and how they were addressed .
The Research Question
This thesis asks whether older people in New Zealand are treated as senior citizens. Senior citizenship in this conceptualisation is relational , linked with both autonomy and connectedness, and measured in terms of q uality of l ife and social inclusion. This question focuses on outcomes in various key domains which have been identified as important indicators of social wel lbeing and a sense of belonging (Ministry of Social Policy, 2001 b) . They are: physical and mental health; safety and secu rity ; social con nected ness (family and com m u n ity ties) ; material standards of living; knowledge and skills; paid work; human rights; culture and identity and physical environment.
My methodological aims were to document narrative accounts of the lives of older people, contextualised by changes in income, health and housing policies during their lifetimes, and secondly, to find ways of doing this; in other words, to test a method (Atkinson, 1 994) . The research process was based on " political analysis for action" (Barndt, 1 989, p. 8) . Aiming for the rich detail and depth of individual narratives within the "more insightful and reflective mode of a group setting" (Atkinson, 1 994, p. 97) , I wanted to offer opportunities for the performance of citizenship to groups of older people in community settings. The research design and methods were selected for the possibilities they offered for providing answers to the research question about the meaning of senior citizenship.
Methodological Framework
Methodology refers to the philosophical framework of a human science perspective (Van Manen, 1 990) . It could be described as the theory behind the method , including the study of what method should be used and why. Phenomenological human science, Van Manen says (ibid , p. 29) , is "discovery oriented " , with an approach towards research that aims at being "presuppositionless":
i n other words, this i s a methodology that tries to ward off any tendency toward constructing a predetermined set of fixed procedures, techniques and concepts that would rule-govern the research project.
The methods, Van Manen arg ues, should be d iscovered or i nvented in response to the research question. Discussions of method and methodology are meant "not to prescribe a mechanistic set of procedu res, but to animate inventiveness and stimulate insight" (ibid , p. 30) .
The research design is situated within a qualitative approach selected for its strengths in add ressing questions of meaning and its appropriateness to the generating of individual and collective stories. However, the approach also uses critical epistemology, which searches for patterns in human behaviour and social relations rather than universal laws. The focus in such an approach is on the context of people's lives, and on possibilities rather than prediction (Smith et ai , 1 997) . Because of my primary interest in the capacity and agency of senior citizens rather than their dependency or their needs, I was looking for a way of enabling them not only to speak for themselves, but to hold conversations with each other that had the potential to be enriching, encou raging and em poweri n g . The development of a methodological framework was therefore guided by my search for a way of doing research with rather than on older people, as well as enabling them to engage in deliberative conversations with each other.
Despite criticism of the idea that any particular way of doing research is inherently feminist, research methods such as u nstructured interviews and oral history approaches have come to be associated with feminist research because of the way they have often enabled women's stories to be told in their own words (Dupuis and Neale, 1 998) . Focus group interviews used by feminist researchers to conduct research which includes male participants illustrate how methods of enquiry may be adapted to explore new areas and answer a range of questions (ibid) . Because it is "additive", in the sense of crossing disciplinary boundaries, and "reflexive", in the sense of challenging inherent assumptions, feminist theory has the potential to enrich critical gerontology and to "sharpen" enquiry into ageing (Achenbaum, 1 997, p. 24) .
While there is no one way to do feminist research, feminist research does draw on research traditions which present the 'view from below', in the process challenging social inequalities, developing research techniques and providing a rationale and inspiration for researchers working with other oppressed groups. It may therefore be used appropriately to inform the research questions and methods that are used to produce complex information about older people, both men and women.
I used a group research process to locate older people in their social contexts, and through "collectivisation" of their experiences (Mies, 1 983, p. 1 28) to offer them an opportunity to construct a shared understanding of the social, cultural, and economic determinants of old age. In my counselling work with older people with visual impairment I admired the vigour and imagination and the capacity which the people I worked with invariably brought to the therapeutic enterprise. At the same time, I noticed how often they struggled with the loneliness of isolation from social groups and relational networks. My interest was aroused about the various reasons for this. I noticed that some people withdrew from their customary social activities due to a loss of confidence or restricted mobility, and that for some their isolation was enforced by transport difficulties, the death of friends and the loss of peer support networks. My hunch was that the people I was seeing may in fact be less isolated than other old people, in the sense that having
been identified as having a visual im pairment they were drawn into a network of social services and volunteer support. I therefore conceived of the research project as a way of investigating experiences of 'independent' ageing and at the same time offering opportunities for participation and social inclusion. Offering people opportunities for telling their stories seemed ideal as a source of richly patterned data and as a method which had the potential to involve participants in satisfying social interaction.
Telling Stories
Stories provide the "frames" that enable us to interpret our experiences, and these acts of interpretation are "achievements that we take an active part in" (Wh ite, 1 995, page 1 5) . We work hard , Wh ite argues, to make sense out of the "ambiguities, contradictions and contingencies" that "stretch our meaning-making resources" (ibid) . Thinking about the stories people tell in the therapeutic process of making sense of their lives to an audience of one in the counselling context led me to thinking about the creative possibilities of telling stories to a wider audience. I was influenced by Myerhoff's description (cited in White, 1 995, p. 1 78) of the "definitional ceremonies" through which an elderly, relatively invisible Jewish community found an "arena for appearing" and "opportunities for self - and collective proclamations of being " :
Definitional ceremonies deal with the problems of invisibility and marginality; they are strategies that provide opportunities for being seen and in one's own terms, garnering witnesses to one's worth, vitality and being (Myerhoff, 1 986, p. 267) .
White notes the critical role that the "outsider witness" plays in these "definitional ceremonies" (ibid) and Myerhoff herself (1 982, p . 1 03) sees such performances as "opportunities for appearing ' " for unless we exist i n the eyes of others, we may come to doubt even our own existence " . The self-consciousness of the old people, "promoted by collective performances and private self-narration, their recounting of stories and life histories" has "influenced and nourished their success as old people". All of this requires "skill, craft, a coherent, consensually validated set of symbols, and social arenas for appearing" (ibid) . It also, critically, requ ires an audience as well as performers" (ibid) . In the case of the Jewish old people she studied , Myerhoff claims that others were needed "to affirm not only that their lives mattered but that they were really there at all " (ibid, p. 1 06) . Her introduction of a set of Life History classes provided them with "an opportunity to be heard, to recount their h istories and tell stories" and "another arena in which they could appear in their own terms, and I would serve as audience, conspicuously listening and documenting what was said " . She hoped also "that some satisfaction would come to them from listening to each other i n formal circumstances, that they would validate one another'S accounts, and at the same time stim ulate and encourage each other's memories": all these hopes were fully realised in the "Living History" sessions (ibid , p . 1 1 4) . The sessions, Myerhoff argues, were not merely verbal, but were made into performances in which people "displayed the qualities they wanted seen as much as they could and became what they displayed " (ibid , p. 1 1 5) .
The term "re-membering" signifies the special type of recol lection which effects "the reaggregation of members, the figures who belong to one's life story, one's own prior selves, as well as significant others who are part of the story" (ibid, p. 1 1 1 ) . I n the process of the "focused u nification provided by Re-membering " , Myerhoff argues, a "life i s given a shape that extends back in the past and forward into the future", in the process becoming a "tidy edited tale" (ibid). "A story told aloud to progeny or peers is" Myerhoff asserts, " more than a text. It is an event . " (ibid , p . 1 1 6) , which changes both the teller, engaged in "the deep and serious work of Re-memberi ng" and the listener. Without Re-membering, Myerhoff argues, "we lose our histories and ourselves" (ibid , p . 1 1 1 ) .
The Promise of Biography
Rees' (1 991 ) analysis of the exercise of power and what he calls "the promise of biography" is also concerned with replacing powerlessness with a sense of power, and "coherence which comes from fitting together those things which may have remained separate" (ibid, p. 9) . The promise of biography lies in telling a story with a view to participating in future events in a different way:
The telling of a story will contribute to empowerment if the listeners as well as the storytellers recognise the importance of coherence: the relationship between points in a cross-section. Coherence connotes the value of joining ideas and activities which usually remain separate (Rees, 1 991 , p. 2 1 ) .
Acknowledging his debt t o Freire and others, and defining politics broadly as "mutual education, as the means of influencing choices through the constant process of communication with others from all walks of life with a view to defi ning the public good" , Rees argues (ibid, p. 41 ) that the promise of biography lies in the connection between personal and political identity through a process of change which enables people to replace powerlessness with a measure of choice and control. The reality of biographical work with older people is that some people find it u nbearably troubling or pointless, and even if it is pleasurable, the evidence for the value of reminiscence work is "at best equivocal " (Gillies and James, 1 994, p, 1 6) . Another real dilemma for the researcher is the problem of withdrawing at the end of the research process if the participant is not ready or willing to finish reminiscing.
Reminiscence and Oral History
Biographical methods are linked to both reminiscence and oral history. I began by searching for examples of reminiscence work being practised primarily in hospices and rest homes. I cou ld find no local facilities wh ich were doing
reminiscence work, so I obtained my information from facilities in Wellington (Mary Potter Hospice) and Dunedin (Presbyterian Support) . Whether carried out with individuals or in groups, this work was constructed primarily as a therapeutic enterprise, with the emphasis on the speaker's personal past and on the creation of a legacy, a tangible l ife story in book form, with accompanying photographs. My aim was to offer opportunities to talk about the past in a way that would link people with each other and with the present and future. Biographical stories offer such opportunities, as Munford and Walsh-Tapiata (1 999, p. 24) explain:
The process of story-telling in a spontaneous and creative way, and the linking of personal troubles to public issues, can bring a sense of power to the individual and group.
This kind of collective story-telling was intended to help ind ividual older people make sense of their own struggles "in relation to the dominant constraints and opportunities" (ibid) of the world we live in. Again, the possibilities for resistance and observable change were limited in reality by the size and scale of the research project; by the limitations of the research design ; by the personal agenda and social setting of each individual ; and by the group dynamics. The reality for the groups I interviewed was that people were alerted to possibilities and opportunities for change, and they planned for change, but social change was not empirically observable in the group context.
Rem i n iscence has developed into "a g u ided and structured form of self exploration , a means to exploring and reviewi ng a l ife, through personal accounting" (Bornat, 1 994, p. 2) . It has been argued that separating oral history and reminiscence "risks the distancing of older people in the process and weakens their control over what is produced " (Bornat, 1 989, p. 20) , and that the difference between these two types of intervention is a matter of focus:
Oral history values memory as a source of information about the past. The boundary between reminiscence work and oral history is finely drawn but forms around a focus on content, rather than process. Groups of older people, with or without group facilitators whose main concern is the retrieval of past experience and its recording or preservation, in some way can be said to be taking part in oral history. When those same groups share memories with a view to understanding each other, or a shared situation, or with the aim of bringing about some change in their current lives, they are involved in reminiscence work . . . The difference is fine, and indeed the most rewarding experiences occur when there is awareness and promotion of links between the two perspectives (Sornat, 1 994, p. 3) .
The appeal of a modified life history approach to the kind of research I wanted to carry out lay in its particular capacity for paying attention to individual and collective stories, as Bornat (ibid , p. 7) explains:
. . . while reminiscence work enables the recognition of shared experience and helps to build collective ties, it must always sustain an ability to differentiate experience and to value that individuality which guarantees esteem and understanding in old age.
Reminiscence and the talk that goes on in reminiscence groups are profoundly social activities that have the potential to "demarginalise" older people by acknowledging their role in nurturing and transmitting cultural values and traditions.