Depictions of older adults residing in nursing homes: a Goffman-inspired thematic analysis of children’s picture books in a Danish context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Some children may witness their grandparents or great-grandparents spending their final days in a nursing home, while others have peers with older relatives living in nursing homes. Children learn about ageing through experience and exposure, where picture books can also shape their perceptions and attitudes toward older adults residing in nursing homes. Aim To explore the underlying beliefs and attitudes about ageing and older adults residing in nursing homes depicted in children’s picture books in a Danish context. Methods A systematic search of children’s picture books was conducted in the national Danish library catalogue. The search strategy initially identified 360 books, all were manually screened against the inclusion and exclusion criteria. In total, 22 met the inclusion criteria. Data were extracted and analysed using a descriptive and reflexive thematic analysis, methodologically inspired by Braun and Clarke and theoretically informed by Goffman. Results The empirical material consisted of 439 pages containing text and/or illustrations depicting nursing homes and/or older adults living in them. The first editions were published between 1973 and 2022, with all books (re)printed in Denmark after 1975. The books originated from nine countries, with the majority from Denmark ( n = 9). Three overarching themes were constructed: “ Nursing homes—a housing solution between necessity and coercion ,” “ Associations between nursing homes and kindergartens ,” and “ The present was the past and death was the future .” Nursing homes were depicted both as care facilities and places of forced residence, often akin to kindergartens and reinforcing the infantilization of older adults. Older adult characters were often depicted as equals to children, while the middle generation functioned as a bridge between generations without much interaction with older adults. Few books addressed death directly, and those that did tended to portray it in romanticized terms, surrounded by a nuclear family. Conclusion Picture books reinforced certain stereotypes about nursing homes, older adults, and family dynamics. Future publications should consider ways to integrate realistic and diverse depictions of nursing homes, their residents, and friends and family that visit.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".