Intergenerationality and Anticipation at Older Age in the UK Among 68-83 Year Olds, 2021

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This qualitative data was collected as part of an engaged phenomenological PhD project in 10 conversational interviews with participants aged 68-83 (seven women, three men). Interviews took place over Zoom or over the phone. Participants were asked about their important relationships, when they thought about their age, whether age mattered to them, feeling part of a generation, relating to people of different ages, how the COVID-19 pandemic had affected life, and how caring for others had affected their outlook on ageing. Themes in these interviews include COVID-19, gratitude and privilege, parenthood and grandparenthood, intergenerational judgement, retrospection, perceptions of the life course, risk and caution, priorities, care, generations, temporality, and technology. All names are pseudonyms, either chosen by the participant or selected by the researcher.

In this thesis, I complement insights from age studies with philosophical phenomenology to develop an account of ‘older age’ by heeding insights offered by older participants in qualitative interviews. In particular, I focus on the topics of intergenerationality and anticipation. I explore how participants experienced tensions between ‘keeping an open mind’ at older age, intergenerational shifts in cultural norms, and social separation between generations—interpreting this as a rupture in the intergenerational habitus. I also argue that public health anticipations pertaining to older age can be understood as co-constitutive of older people’s outlook on their future, and that the participants’ perspectives show just how difficult—or indeed impossible—it can be to know in advance what the best approach to successful ageing is. These investigations intertwine concepts from both age studies and phenomenology, including the notion of the ‘decline narrative,’ the ‘successful ageing’ framework, the ‘third vs. fourth age’ distinction, and phenomenology of embodiment, habit, and habitus-formation. This thesis is informed by principles of engaged research, and its content and development has been shaped in dialogue with a number of older people. The fundamental phenomenological research is led by this engagement. The thesis also sets out an original methodological perspective for future engaged phenomenological projects—drawing from critical and generative phenomenology, as well as literature on engaged and participatory practices. This approach to research, which I call engaged phenomenology, explores (1) how the social, political, and institutional context of a research project frames its operative concepts and concerns, and (2) how best to meaningfully work together with communities whose experiences are foregrounded in a study. I argue that adopting these approaches can enable phenomenologists to more effectively realise the critical and generative potential of phenomenological methodology more broadly.