Two lives in transition: Agency and context for assisted living residents

This research uses data on two “focal case” individuals residing in one residential care/assisted living (RC/AL) facility, collected as part of a larger ethnographic study exploring later-life transitions, including those leading to the moves into housing and care settings. In-depth examination of the 10-year transition histories of these two women highlights the major erosion of autonomy with advancing frailty, illness, and relocation into supportive housing. A second major theme is that an understanding of the contemporary events and challenges for these two individuals is substantially enhanced by nesting them within the temporal context of earlier life events, including personal relationships, social events, and preferences. Individual history, elicited from resident, family, staff and professional views, serves to contextualize current choices and reactions to key events. As researchers, adding this temporal context moves our understanding of their identities well beyond a simplistic snapshot view as “resident” in AL.