Elderly women and the experience of social exclusion (Case study: women living in nursing house of Khorramabad city)

Abstract

This qualitative research attempts to study the lived experiences of elderly women living in nursing houses of Khorramabad city in the field of social exclusion. To do this, we have used grounded theory to analyze the causal conditions, intervening conditions and consequences of elderly women’s lived experiences of social exclusion. The subjects were selected through purposeful sampling from the residents of Haj Seddique and Farzanegan nursing house. The data were gathered by way of deep semi-structured interview. The findings show that the causal conditions of social exclusions are: women’s lack of independent economic status (lack of financial support and loss of ability to work), decline of traditional solidarity in the family (decline of mothers’ authority, generational gap, the growth of individualism) and the transformation of lifestyles (transformation of home’s equipment, semantic change of family labor and the domination of gender bias). These are activated through some intervening conditions such as: extreme pessimism and feeling of loneliness. The first one is characterized by mistrust in society and internal vulnerability; and the second factor can be observed in nostalgia for a golden past and the feeling of being forgotten. It is in this way that they feel that they are dis-embedded from the life-world and thrown into the way of gradual death. So, they represent some symptoms such as silence/ aggressiveness, feeling of rootlessness and self-illness. Or, they believe in extreme fatalism and dying experiences.

Keywords

• social exclusion
• elderly women
• generational gap