My final week of research was a productive one! I completed many interviews with hospital staff including more than three physicians, three interns, and two nurses. I did not complete as many rank-ordering as I had hoped to, but I still ended up with a lot of insightful responses. I am looking forward to conducting data analysis to further understand the common perceptions and meanings of pain and aging. As mentioned briefly before, I have already started to see some of the trends through observations, interviews, and informal discussions, but have not started to analyze my data.

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Overall, I believe the data collection has been very insightful and I am beginning to see themes regarding pain and age. For one, elders, called wazee in Swahili, are viewed as inevitably having pain which can lead to overlooking problems potentially not related to age. Before arriving, I knew that “home-care” was much more common in Tanzania as there are many generational households and not senior care options such as nursing homes in the States. However, I have been surprised by how complex this really is. Before my time in Tanzania, I had a very narrow view of elder care and due to work experience in nursing homes, automatically assumed care by family members is better. However, it is not this simple as one may have guessed. Many people brought this up as a problem in interviews and that families are not equipped to care for their loved ones and that many people move to larger urban areas, leaving elderly to live alone or even care for the grandchildren. Another problem discussed is the usage of “pombe”, or alcohol. Many elders drink alcohol as they now have “a right to” in their old age and this is connected to a variety of other problems. Going into this project, I also had a very narrow view of what kind of pain I’d be looking at: physical. However, in regards to age, psychological, social, religious, and other forms of pain were much more apparent within older populations. The project has evolved and changed throughout my time here and I can value the importance of preliminary fieldwork and changing research questions in anthropology more than ever before. Moreover, I planned to utilize multi-dimensional scalar analysis for the rank ordering method but that seems more difficult now. People’s answers have varied much more significantly than I thought they would, so I will no longer analyze the data that way, but the mere fact of the varying answers is just as insightful. In the end, I completed over 35 interviews, 25 rank orderings, and have over 100 pages of typed field notes. In the Fall semester I will need help translating interviews and then will transcribe interviews, complete a thematic analysis of my data using MAXQDA, and write my thesis!

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To the left are pictures of my host family and I!