What do people with ID understand about the experience of ageing?

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  What do older people with intellectual disability understand about the process and experience of ageing?

• IRAS ID

  142167

• Contact name

  Anna Whiteley

• Contact email

  anna.whiteley@nhs.net

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Edinburgh

• Research summary

  People with an intellectual disability (ID) are now living longer (Ward, 2012), yet relatively little is known about how this population experience this. The participants in this study will be older adults with a learning disability (aged 70 – 75 years), recruited from the local NHS Specialist Learning Disability Service in Dumfries and Galloway. The research will explore with participants how they make sense of getting older, whether they see themselves as getting old and what their ageing experiences means to them.

  Potential participants will initially be approached by Community Nurses from the team. Participants will not be actively receiving input from the team and will be required to provide informed consent to participate. A maximum of ten participants will be recruited from the health board area. The research will be qualitative, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) with semi-structured interviews from each participant. Interviews will be recorded in an agreed location, up loaded as a digital file and transcribed by the Chief Investigator. Consequently participants will need to have sufficient expressive language to enable the interview to take place and to provide sufficient material for data analysis.

  IPA will allow the quality and texture of individual experiences of ageing to be identified and interpreted (Willig, 2004). Each interview will be coded to allow for the identification of themes. These will subsequently be arranged into meaningful thematic clusters both within and then across participants.

  This is a potentially important research area that could enable a greater professional understanding of older adults with ID and their views, influence the support provided to service users and contributes to future service development. Service user input is also acknowledged as beneficial for service development.

  References
  Ward, C. (2012). BILD Factsheet: Older people with a learning disability. Kidderminster: British Institute of Learning Disabilities

  Willig, C. (2004). Introducing qualitative research in psychology: Adventures in theory and method. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

• REC name

  London - Brent Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  14/LO/1145

• Date of REC Opinion

  27 Jun 2014

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion