Spirituality and Ageing : The Spiritual Narratives of Contemporary Older Australians

Abstract

The current research interest in spirituality and ageing is in part driven by the need to debate the increasing social and economic impact of ageing populations in Western societies. Australia is actively participating in these debates that in part, discuss the productive role that spirituality might assume for older Australians. However recent scholarship has provided limited data about the specific features of older Australians’ spirituality. Moreover the relevance of current disciplinary discourses of spirituality in terms of the spiritual experiences of older individuals also remains largely untested in the literature. This study seeks to address the research problem of the relative lack of data available on the accounts of spirituality of older contemporary Australian individuals and on the associated relevance of current disciplinary discourses of spirituality. The research problem is significant in that without evidence based accounts of the spiritual experiences of older Australians appropriately targeted future research, policy formulation and practices across a range of social contexts will be compromised or limited. The older Australians in this study are a self-selected sample; they are aged 65 and over; and have identified some personal experiences as spiritual. This study employs a qualitative interdisciplinary bricolage research design in association; (i) with Denzin’s interpretive interactionism to collect and analyse data over several encounters on the narrated spiritual experiences of these older Australians; and (ii) with the method of narrative literary criticism to establish thematic patterns in Scriptural narratives associated with the old protagonists of Abraham, Job, Simeon and Anna. The interpretive interaction study of contemporary narrated experiences reports significant new data which has been consolidated into a contemporary Australian cohort generated model of spirituality comprising content, sequence and dynamics as features. The narrative literary criticism study also makes a significant contribution to scholarship.