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The kitchens project featured on BBC Radio 4's 'You and Yours' broadcast on Monday 22nd April 2013. You can listen again here.
Shall we talk kitchens?
Is the kitchen an important room in your home? Have you altered how you use it over the years according to family size or moves you have made? Does your current kitchen adequately meet your requirements or is there anything about it you would like to change? These are some of the questions we have been putting to older people living in different types of housing in Bristol and Loughborough, as part of an ESRC funded project within the New Dynamics of Ageing programme.
The kitchen is an important domestic space at any age but one that may raise particular expectations or challenges as we age. Our aim is to learn more about how people, as they get older, think about and use their kitchen as well as their experiences of the kitchen over time. Our goal is to produce information and advice of value to older people, occupational therapists, kitchen designers, architects, builders, and policy makers, by providing an understanding of user requirements for kitchen design and adaptation. An important outcome of the study will be the production of a guide that considers ways in which the 'lifetime' kitchen can become a reality within 'lifetime' homes.
To conduct our study we invited people aged over 60, living in a broad range of mainstream and supported housing settings in Bristol and Loughborough, to take part in research interviews. Researchers carried out two interviews with each participant, in the home. The first interview gathered information about the participant's previous kitchens and any changes in the use of function of past kitchens, as well as a discussion of the current kitchen and its attributes or drawbacks. The second interview focused exclusively on the person's current kitchen - learning more about their physical abilities and kitchen routines. This interview also provided an opportunity for the researcher to measure, sketch the kitchen and examine lighting, and, with agreement, take photographs of anything the participant drew attention to. This combination of data gathering methods helped us produce good quality data.
The study is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary enterprise between social gerontologists based at The Open University and ergonomists based at Loughborough University
These pages are the personal responsibility of Sheila Peace.
The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of The Open University. The University takes no responsibility for any material on these pages.
The kitchen is an important domestic space at any age but one that may raise particular expectations or challenges as we age. Our aim is to learn more about how people, as they get older, think about and use their kitchen as well as their experiences of the kitchen over time. Our goal is to produce information and advice of value to older people, occupational therapists, kitchen designers, architects, builders, and policy makers, by providing an understanding of user requirements for kitchen design and adaptation. An important outcome of the study will be the production of a guide that considers ways in which the 'lifetime' kitchen can become a reality within 'lifetime' homes.
To conduct our study we invited people aged over 60, living in a broad range of mainstream and supported housing settings in Bristol and Loughborough, to take part in research interviews. Researchers carried out two interviews with each participant, in the home. The first interview gathered information about the participant's previous kitchens and any changes in the use of function of past kitchens, as well as a discussion of the current kitchen and its attributes or drawbacks. The second interview focused exclusively on the person's current kitchen - learning more about their physical abilities and kitchen routines. This interview also provided an opportunity for the researcher to measure, sketch the kitchen and examine lighting, and, with agreement, take photographs of anything the participant drew attention to. This combination of data gathering methods helped us produce good quality data.
The study is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary enterprise between social gerontologists based at The Open University and ergonomists based at Loughborough University
These pages are the personal responsibility of Sheila Peace.
The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of The Open University. The University takes no responsibility for any material on these pages.
