The project researchers visited 20 homes which continue to be residential care homes today. The visits were usually for two or three days, during which the manager of the home and four residents were interviewed and the interviews recorded on a digital recorder. The visiting researcher also carried out a survey of the building, noting changes and refurbishments carried out since the late 1950s. With the permissions of the owner, manager and residents, photographs were taken of the building and on occasion of the residents. Reports have been written by the researchers drawing on the data. This methodology replicated as far as possible (given present-day ethical constraints) the approach followed by Peter Townsend and his researchers when he visited the homes in the late 1950s.
The purpose of the visits and interviews was to discover evidence of both change and continuity between the way the homes functioned in the past and their use in 2006/2007. We also aimed to compare the quality of care, then and now. Differences or similarities over time between different types of homes - voluntary, private, former PAIs, and other local authority - are also of interest to us as they were to Townsend and the original researchers. The data we have gathered has been analysed and, as expected, there have been many changes since the late 1950s. However, there are also some continuities. The changes relate largely to the new standards to which homes are required to conform, which have resulted in refurbishments and improvements to the buildings and the environment. There are also major changes in the varied ethnicity of the staff, with some homes now being staffed almost entirely by people from Eastern Europe, China or Thailand, as well as British Indians or Africans. As well as these changes, however, the interviews have also revealed continuities, indicating that many issues - such as funding, freedom to make choices, type of activities, medication, quality of care - remain similar to those referred to in the reports of the 1950s. In addition, there is some evidence that some voluntary homes retain their status today (as in 1958) as comfortable, warm and welcoming:
... the really pleasant thing about [this home] is the way all rooms look lived-in - towels on the radiators, bookcases, hairbrushes, photos lying about ... Matron asked me what I thought of the untidiness. I said I thought
it was wonderful.
(1959 Report)
This home is in a beautiful Victorian house. It is shabby and in need of complete refurbishment and upgrading and this is going to be done in 2007. Not much money has been spent on the fabric of the building in the last few years ... Inside the home: it is quite untidy but not unpleasantly so - more like a family home - and interestingly, that is just how Townsend described it too. He was pleased to see untidiness. It looked lived-in to him.
(2006 Report)
The question of the role - or even the necessity - of residential care homes remains a focus of much research as well as media interest. Our project aims to add to the debate by using our data from both the tracing study and the follow-up study to draw some conclusions regarding the history of policy and practice of caring for older people in residential care homes.