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Introduction: This activity addresses social isolation in older adults but having them connect, share experiences and relate with members of their family in younger generations though verbal conversations of memories, memorabilia and music. This activity was implemented with my grandmother, Susan, on April 18th, 2024. Feedback from my community partner was given on April 18th, 2024, and from Susan, a few hours after the activity.
My experience thus far: I have accomplished a deeper understanding of my grandparents. There was more overlap in our experiences than I expected there to be. I accomplished a bit of lyric analysis with the songs selected and facilitating determining meaning. I learned that my grandma and I had a couple shared experiences that were negative that really impacted us and that she felt strongly about moving frequently. I believe it was a fairly effective assignment because the songs that were picked created ties to the memories and experiences being shared and then further represented the connection between younger generation and older generation. My grandmother started laughing when the song “Splish Splash” was decided upon to represent college kids going home on the weekend to do laundry. Seeing this as something that she experienced and I experienced, (on the other end, I did the same thing to my parents during my time in college) she was quite pleased with the song and enjoyed the forged bond. I think it was effective because my grandma got very excited about the opportunity to share her experiences and her path to get to where she is today. They had a lot of cool stories about unique travels and a lot of moments where we connected, and she didn’t realize. An example of this was when she shared that she would take the whole family on a bike ride and go on picnics. In the same way, I did that with my Dad when I was little! We then picked a song to solidify that connection. I tried to create a partnership for this activity between family members by having a younger generation member and an older generation family member. Because of the time crunch I had to be the younger family member. I would have liked to facilitate this activity with others outside of my own family. On top of this, I would have liked to have facilitated this activity in person. Being over telehealth made communication slightly more difficult and there were a couple of technological errors. I also have concerns that facilitating this won’t be as impactful on my area of need “social isolation” as much as in person connection. That being said, making this a telehealth activity does make it more successful.
My assumptions thus far: I assumed that I would be meeting with people to implement this activity in person. It was interesting to see the processing difference between older adults in my community, I once again assumed it would be the same but there was fluctuation between all the older adults, I worked with that are all living independently and their processing time. I assumed my grandma’s experiences would be very different from my own considering growing up partially in Germany and it being a different era. All of these assumptions have led to me in the past rolling my eyes when my grandmother started a story with “back in my day…”. This activity made me listen and it was good for our relationship to better understand her perspectives and where she is coming from. This can inform how I view other older adults in the community that I will work with in the future.
My knowledge and skills thus far: I gained some more insight into independent living older adults in the community and how they function. I gained more understanding in how I could work through facetime to talk the steps of creating a playlist together. I overcame the gaps in my knowledge regarding technical issue and still managed to share and play music with my grandma. I can definitely improve by asking more guided questions. The Tamplin article was helpful to give me questions that explain “Why?” but I still feel as though I need to improve my facilitation of when I ask “Why?” and how I ask “Why?”. It was challenging to guide the conversation back to the music when my grandma was sharing a story. Some experiences she shared didn’t have musical associations or any connections to music and it was hard to find a way to relate and incorporate them. But those stories are still an important part of shaping who my grandma is, so it is important to think about and include those stories. I did enjoy taking some memorabilia like the magnets I was shown and relating them to my own experiences and then into a song.
My actions thus far: I would like to facilitate this activity again, but maybe design an adaptation of this activity to it adheres more to telehealth. This could make it more accessible to individuals and their grandparent(s) to do this activity even if they are geographically separated. I would also like to see how this activity can function when I am not the individual of the younger generation. Connecting an older adult in the community to one of their relatives would be really cool in addressing my original goal of social isolation.
Feedback from my Participants & from my Community Partner
Community Partner
1) What worked well during this activity?
I liked the fact that you gave her a playlist of everything once it was completed.
2) What could I do better in my next activity?
I was unclear about how to see the finished product after the completion of the activity, including the memorabilia.
3) What would you like more of during the activity?
When the whole project is over, I’d like to go through and play 20~30 seconds of each song. It would also be helpful if the next day someone could go back and play the songs and see if they resonate with the person, but I guess that’s the point of giving them a copy of the playlist.
Participant(s)
1) What worked well during this activity?
"It was Neat that you (Zach) would be interested in knowing more about my life. It showed that you actually cared and you were interested in how I grew up and such. Too many young people today don’t have a clue the difference between today and what it was like back then."
2) What could I do better in my next activity?
"Having to think. I hadn’t given much thought too much about all those parts of my life."
3) What would you like more of during the activity?
"I would like to go into more details about my life and little experiences. Ex: Like learning to sew. maybe more time to complete the activity?"
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