Welcome to the website for the ‘Feeling Safe? Feeling Vulnerable?’ research project. This website reports on and shares learning from the project. It contains some of the tools and discussion presentations we developed to be used by others.
‘Feeling Safe? Feeling Vulnerable?’ was a two-year research project led by Dr Fiona Sherwood-Johnson and Kathryn Mackay, of Stirling University, Scotland, in collaboration with Ceartas, an independent advocacy organisation in East Dunbartonshire. It was funded by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust Fund.
The project set out to explore:
- What ‘safety’ and ‘vulnerability’ mean to older people living in the community;
- How these meanings and experiences can best be captured, in research and service contexts.
Outputs from the project include materials for people who use services, their carers, independent advocates and other professionals, as well as tools for use in future research projects.
The project was prompted by changes in law, policy and practice concerned with keeping adults safe from abuse and harm. The project was different from other “adult support and protection” (ASP) research, however, because it:
- Focused on the views and experiences of older people;
- Started from people’s own meanings and lived experiences, whether or not they meet formal criteria which would trigger ASP;
- Focused on people’s strengths and the factors that keep them safe.
This means that understandings of vulnerability, safety and harm came from the older people who participated themselves. The research was a collaborative venture involving older people and Ceartas representatives at every stage, from the design of methods to the dissemination of findings.
There were three stages of work:
- First, two focus groups were conducted with older people. Participants were invited to discuss the concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘vulnerability’, and to consider how best to explore these topics further, in relation to specific individuals’ lives.
- Second, five volunteers were recruited from amongst the focus group participants, to try out the research methods developed over a further three month period.
- Third, participants collaborated in analysing findings, designing and disseminating outputs.
The project began in January 2017 and ran until the end of July 2019.