Keywords
Aging
Salud del anciano
Health of the Elderly
Cultura
Culture
Personas con Discapacidad
Disabled Persons
How to Cite
Abstract
This article presents part of the results of a research Project called: Understanding the care of elderly people in disability and poverty situations. The objective is to describe and analyze the meaning of old age and disability, given by elderly people in a marginal urban area of Bogota, Colombia, from a cultural perspective.
This qualitative study made use of interpretive Ethnography. The data were gathered through participant observation and interviews in depth. The contributors were 39 elderly women and men with some kind of disability. The analysis of the data took M. Leininger’s proposal of the following three cultural topics into consideration: (a) one realizes his/her illness, because body is not as useful as before, (b) old age: many diseases and few capabilities, and (c) disability… living one’s life in the hands of the others.
The meaning of old age and disability in elderly people is a socio-cultural construction -with strong influence from religion, social class factors and values- that leads to think it is not possible to conceive elderly or disabled people as an homogeneous group. Therefore, it is required to understand the way each population conceives old age and disability in order to break homogeneous rehabilitation and care schemes —which in most of the cases are centered in biological aspects and deficiency— in order to advance to capabilities respectful and promoting models, making specific demands in accordance with cultural diversity.
The journal Investigación en Enfermería: Imagen y Desarrollo is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
Approving the intervention of the work (review, copy-editing, translation, layout) and the following outreach, are granted through an use license and not through an assignment of rights. This means the journal and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cannot be held responsible for any ethical malpractice by the authors. As a consequence of the protection granted by the use license, the journal is not required to publish recantations or modify information already published, unless the errata stems from the editorial management process. Publishing contents in this journal does not generate royalties for contributors.