Scotland

This paper examines key challenges and strategies for including older people with dementia in an ethnographic study of quality of life in institutional care settings. The methods of interview and observation are described in relation to meeting four research challenges: verbal communication impairment, memory loss, decision-making capacity, and emotional disposition.

The concept of social capital is very much an ‘adult’ concept, created by adults for adults, with children as the passive recipients of, primarily, parental social capital. The concept has been broken down into three particular subcategories – bonding (getting by), bridging (getting on) and linking (getting around). However, these subcategories equally do not relate readily to children and young people nor to different groups of young people.