El Encuentro con el Otro

This study focused on exploring the perceptions of elder abuse among community-dwelling older Chinese people and health and social care professionals who work with older people in Hong Kong. Specifically, the study sought to develop an understanding of the complex nature of elder abuse including older people’s perceptions of what constitutes elder abuse, their potential help-seeking preferences and health and social care professionals’ preferred interventions when faced with abusive situations.

When considering which broad research approach (quantitative or qualitative) to use in this study, I asked myself one main question: ‘which approach would

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best address the research questions?’ Given the nature and aims of the study,

and the fact that little prior work had been undertaken on the subject of enquiry, a qualitative research method seemed most appropriate.

It has been suggested that qualitative methods should be used when little is known about a phenomenon and/or when the investigator suspects that existing knowledge or theories may not be fully developed (Morse and Field 1995). Although elder abuse is not a new phenomenon, as noted above, the perspectives of community-dwelling older Chinese people regarding this matter have hitherto seldom been explored.

Moreover, as mentioned in Chapter 2, Hong Kong’s contemporary knowledge and theories about elder abuse have been mostly borrowed from Western countries. In this context, a qualitative method was deemed the most appropriate to answer the foreshadowed questions that were outlined at the end of the previous chapter as such methods seek to both describe and understand how and why people act in the way that they do (Rice 1996).

When researchers use qualitative approaches, reality is explored from an emic perspective in order to try to understand life and incidents from the perspective of ‘insiders’ (in my case both older participants and health and social care professionals) in an uncontrolled, naturalistic setting (Morse and Field 1995). This broad approach was consistent with my goals so the next question became: which of the many potential qualitative approaches should I adopt?

From amongst the range of potential qualitative approaches, this study employed an exploratory and explanatory design based on the principles and techniques of grounded theory. Grounded theory (Glaser 1978, 1992; Glaser and

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Strauss 1967), as will be described in detail later, is a methodology that seeks to understand the social processes operating within social structures and is attentive to issues of interpretation without being tied to existing theories and assumptions. Moreover, in addition to adding to knowledge, this approach seeks to generate insights that are likely to have application in the ‘real’ world (Charmaz 2006). This was the approach adopted in the present study.

Why grounded theory and why not other qualitative approaches?

Grounded theory is one of a range of qualitative approaches and it is necessary to consider why it was selected in preference to other alternatives. The key to good qualitative research is selecting the best method to answer the research question(s) (Morse and Richards 2002) and compared with other methods of qualitative inquiry, such as phenomenology and ethnography, grounded theory was considered the most appropriate.

Phenomenology, founded by a German, Edmund Husserl in 1913, is both a research approach and a philosophy (Moustakas 1994). As a method, the basic purpose of phenomenology is to describe the meaning that individuals make of their lived experience of a particular phenomenon, such as the study of lived experience of birthing pain (Kelpin 1984). In the present study however, the goal was to generate a substantive theory on the issue of elder abuse as perceived by the stakeholder groups in Hong Kong’s socio-cultural context, and that this theory should help to inform practice / understanding in this area. Such aims do not lend themselves to a phenomenological approach.

Ethnography as a form of naturalistic research method focuses on describing and interpreting cultures as shared by particular groups or societies (Van Manen

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1997). It usually involves extended periods of participant observation in which the researcher is immersed in the day-to-day lives of the participants and gathers data intended to illuminate the culture(s) that shape participants’ lives (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). According to Arnould and Wallendorf (1994), the characteristics of a typical ethnographic approach include: 1) it collects data in natural settings; 2) prolonged participant observation is a common way of data collection; 3) it uses multiple data sources in order to generate an interpretation which is based on the values of informants.

Whilst there was clearly a cultural dimension to my study it was not the sole consideration, rather it was hoped that the insights gained could be used to consider ways in which elder abuse could be addressed. Moreover, the use of prolonged participant observation as in ethnography was not deemed appropriate in the study of elder abuse. More importantly, the ultimate goal of this study was to generate a mid-range substantive theory to explain the phenomenon of elder abuse in the Hong Kong context. During the theory building process, researcher and participants needed to interact to contribute to the final co-construction. Hence, ethnography was not considered to be the best way to explore the study goals. The next section will discuss in further detail why a grounded theory approach was chosen.