New article in the Privacy Studies Journal: Privacy and Elderly Care in the Home – Past and Present
In the newest PSJ article, Natalie Körner, Emma Klakk, Emma Marshall, and Katrine Mølgaard examine the relationship between privacy and elderly care in the home across three case studies that span over 300 years.
There is a growing tendency in many European countries for elderly people to receive care in the home rather than in institutions. While there are many advantages to bringing health care into the home, it also has consequences for the privacy of cohabiting spouses and family members.
Although this might seem like a contemporary issue, there is in fact a long history of family members and health care professionals navigating complex privacy dynamics when providing care for the elderly.
It is this temporal bridge that the four authors attempt to cross through their varied case studies. We asked Natalie Körner to give us some details on the scholarly process:
Your article includes three case studies: two contemporary and one from the late 17th century. What was the motivation for putting these specific cases into conversation with each other?
Körner: Different approaches to elderly care come and go cyclically (for example home care versus institutional care) - so we were interested in seeing what might be gained by comparing with a more distant past.
Additionally, we were really interested in understanding if the presence of carers would be less disruptive to privacy during a historical period when the house was still more 'open' - (simply said) not a place for strictly domestic activities and one nuclear family. The fact that our historical house was quite a well-off household meant that there were even more people co-habiting, which differs quite drastically from the contemporary cases with just one couple living in each home.
The two contemporary cases were conducted as interviews as well as spatial mappings of the homes. Meanwhile, the historic case was based on archival material. What kind of challenges did you face in comparing such cases which are not only temporally but also methodologically different from each other? And what benefits did you discover in crossing these historical, geographic, and methodological boundaries?
Körner: Great point. This was challenging. Another difference was that in the historical case the niece cared for the patient, while in the contemporary cases it was the husbands. But bridging these differences was possibly by really concretely asking: what are the microstrategies for privacy (for the familial caregiver, with/for the patient, from additional carers) in these difficult times of intense elderly care in the home?
Co-author Emma Klakk describes the work of writing the article and its conclusions in a LinkedIn post:
“This has been a truly interdisciplinary endeavour integrating approaches and theories from architecture, sociology, and social history. Comparing contemporary Danish cases and an early modern British case, we find that being bound to the home by care duties limits the co-habiting caregivers' access to other spaces and relationships, while the presence and support of care workers constrain their ability to draw boundaries in the home.
However, caregivers create pockets of privacy for themselves by collaborating with other family members or servants, creating moments of intimacy with their ill family members, and by making spatial and material arrangements in the home which support the experience of privacy and autonomy for themselves and the patients. Our findings support historical and anthropological privacy studies, suggesting that privacy is a reciprocal and social process which is continuously negotiated.”
The open-access article is available now via the PSJ website.