Life Quality in Care Homes: Chinese and Danish Older Adults’ Perspectives

The demand for care homes appears to be emerging as a key future trend in response to the burgeoning population of older adults, with the need for care provision increasing accordingly. Life quality, happiness and well-being are important factors associated with the care of older residents. This qualitative study explores how older adults moving into care homes view their life quality, from their own perspectives, in two quite different cultural contexts, Chinese and Danish. Older care residents in Shanghai and Denmark participated in the study by means of semi-structured and in-depth interviews. An interpretive phenomenological analysis approach was used for data analysis. Four interrelated themes were identified: positive transfer; positive environment; positive capability and positive experience. The findings demonstrated that older adults considered their quality of life as the result of a dynamic process. Their pursuit of a harmonious status, centered on “change” as the core value, which encompassed both the simplicities and complexities of life. Both older adult groups cared more about their emotional wellbeing, which focused mainly on positive emotions being stimulated while negative emotions were shunned. In the situations when they were “harmonized” by society systems, there was an important emotional thread which continued throughout their whole life that was strongly associated with life quality which was the relationship with family members – be it in the past, present or future.