Strategies for Household Disbandment

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"Household disbandment" refers to tasks that elders undertake for the disposition of personal possessions when they relocate to smaller residential quarters in later life. Disbandment activities are at once cognitive, physical, and emotional, and they have a social dimension. This is a novel topic for gerontological research that bears on numerous issues in aging research and service provision, including independence and effective functioning, self-management, housing and relocation, emotions, self-concept, and family relationships and caregiving. If the sheer physical and emotional demands of disbandment are an obstacle to the timeliness of moves, elders may delay or abandon efforts to move to suitable housing where they can continue to function at optimal levels. For specific aims, this one-year project will (1) disclose the strategies that people use to conceive, organize, and accomplish household disbandment; and (2) illuminate major considerations for the design of a later, larger research project to study the role of possessions in relocation decision making by older people. Project staff will conduct semistructured interviews with 40 households of older persons who have moved to congregate or retirement community settings within the last 4- 8 months. For each of these households, we will also interview one family member who had significant participation in disbandment activities. We will recruit informants from diverse backgrounds. Interviews with elders and family members will guide informants to discuss the circumstances of relocation; the strategies, tactics, and techniques that were used for disposition; the length of the process; extent of family involvement; contested issues; and the agency of the elder compared to others. Using established procedures for interpretation and analysis of qualitative data, our findings will describe (a) people's accounts about the ways that disbandment is accomplished; (b) how themes of meaning enter the narratives; and (c) people's evaluation of their efforts. The project will also attempt to resolve key design issues for a larger study. Findings from this project will be of practical interest to elders and family members and to many categories of service providers.