A velhice em questão: metassíntese sobre significados e pesquisa qualitativa acerca do imaginário coletivo

Abstract

This dissertation consists of two studies that address old age from distinct methodological designs. Study 1 aimed to: (1) establish an overview of Latin American scientific production in the form of qualitative empirical articles dedicated to exploring meanings related to old age according to professionals and managers of long-term care services and (2) critically integrate their respective results. This is a meta-synthesis, in which the SPIDER systematic search tool was used to formulate the guiding question and to direct the searches carried out in the Virtual Health Library. The references located were independently screened and evaluated by two researchers regarding indicators of methodological consistency in terms of the RATS guidelines. The interpretative and critical reading of the results reported by the included references was made possible by the use of inductive thematic analysis. Of the 13 references, 12 were found to be methodologically consistent. Furthermore, two emerging themes were identified, encompassing, respectively, the meanings attributed by professionals and managers to old age as experienced before and after institutionalization. Study 2, in turn, aimed to understand the collective imagination about old age among professionals at a Long-Term Care Facility for the Elderly (ILPI) and included 11 participants, all female, who were dedicated to direct assistance at the establishment in question (mostly as formal caregivers of the elderly) and had completed higher, secondary, or technical education. The recruitment of participants was interrupted when the saturation criterion was met. Data collection was carried out through individual interviews guided by the Thematic Drawings-Stories Procedure (PDE-T). Thus, the participants were initially asked to produce a drawing about "an elderly person," to verbally elaborate a story about the drawing, and then to create a title for the story. In a second phase, a free debate was held around the drawing and the story, to stimulate new associations regarding it. The corpus of the present study was submitted to psychoanalytic interpretation in order to delimit fields of meaning. The first field of meaning, entitled "Grumpy, but affectionate," is organized around the belief, shared by several participants, that aging implies significant changes in mood, but, despite this, older people tend to have an affectionate attitude. The second field of meaning, entitled "Sad and Discontented," was captured due to the observation that, for many participants, institutionalized elderly people were characterized by sadness, specifically because they did not accept their condition. The demarcation of the third field of meaning, entitled "From Understanding to Learning," is due to the fact that several participants seemed to believe that it would be essential to adopt a particularly understanding attitude towards the elderly, because they no longer have full control of their mental faculties and are experiencing the imminence of death. Therefore, the results obtained reveal that, in the collective imagination of the participants, unconscious ideo-affective premises are mixed, highlighting both positive and negative aspects of old age. It seems reasonable to suggest that the quality of gerontological care offered by professionals in long-term care facilities demands the establishment of a dynamic balance between these aspects, and this, in turn, requires constant reflection, including on the aging process itself.