Reimagining Care: Co-Creating Image Guidelines for Later Life

With these image guidelines we aim to ensure respectful and balanced portrayals of care and later life.

We all remember the COVID-19 lockdowns and the enormous impact the virus had on our daily lives. But what you might not recall is how the media began focusing heavily on topics of care and older adults, subjects rarely seen in the media before the pandemic. As researchers on care in later life, we saw this as an opportunity to examine how the media used images to represent care. The Images of Care project aimed to understand how care and later life are portrayed in the media and perceived by older adults in their daily lives.

You might think that media images are a minor concern compared to the broader impacts of the pandemic. However, these images are crucial as they shape assumptions, perceptions, and norms around ageing and care. Media images don’t just show us important events, they influence how we view our place in the world. For topics like ageing, media representations also provide a lens through which we imagine our future.

To understand this better, we analysed images from articles on care and later life written during the pandemic. We found that media images often depict older adults negatively through problematic stereotypes that equate care with a loss of independence and burden. Older adults are rarely shown as active participants in care, which is often portrayed as formal and transactional. These images create a depressing and negative view of care and later life, ignoring the meaningful lives older adults can have even when they need care.

To gain a greater understanding of these images we needed to include older adults in the conversation. We conducted five different workshops where older adults participated in actively co-analysing the images together. Studies have found that older adults feel that they are represented poorly in the media and internalise these negative messages about ageing. Our research echoes these findings, revealing the impact of images on their trust in the media.

Participants in our workshops not only expressed their disappointment with the media but were also enthusiastically motivated to do something that would enact change. Inspired by our participants we decided to co-produce image guidelines. Using our research findings, we drafted guidelines and refined them with participant feedback through collaborative workshops. Participants guided us through multiple drafts, providing input on both design and content.

Reflecting on this process, the importance of including voices of people with lived experience becomes evident. This wasn’t just an exercise in inclusion; it was about doing research in a way that mattered to them. The creation of image guidelines was not our initial goal, it emerged from participants’ strong desire to make a difference. This collaboration also allowed us to understand our findings better and be transparent with participants about these findings.

The process was not perfect and always involved a compromise between participants’ ideas and what we could realistically accomplish. As with every co-produced project, we could have continued refining and getting more feedback from participants. However, the collaboration with participants and our willingness to listen to their ideas was the reason we could produce these valuable guidelines.

With these image guidelines we aim to ensure respectful and balanced portrayals of care and later life, changing how we view aging and care. However, the guidelines are not just a useful tool, they are also testament to the power of collaborative research and the meaningful change that can result when we truly listen to those with lived experience.

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