Older Adult and Animal Companionship
Cherished Pets & RMIT Pilot Study
Summary
The physical isolation of COVID-19 restrictions have impacted greatly on all aspects of society — especially on the vulnerable. For many isolated older adults, animal companions played a key role in supporting their social and emotional wellbeing.
Cherished Pets (CP) is a charity committed to supporting the lives of older adults through animal-human centred approaches to care and independent living. The organisation also supports research into understanding the role that companion pets play in improving the lives of vulnerable people.
From July to October 2020, we connected with CP beneficiaries and volunteers to explore their experiences, perceptions and practices. The aim of the exploratory study was to reflect on the significant value of animals in the lives of older adults, and the important role of CP in facilitating these experiences. We combined ethnographic interviews with digital storytelling to elicit creative ways for collecting older adult participants’ stories.
This report captures the experience of some of the key members of the community and how they value CP. Learnings from this fieldwork will be taken into the place-making game, Pet Playing for Placemaking [PP4P]. We need further research that evidences the value and positive effect of animal companionship in the lives of older people, while also considering how the public can become involved in supporting more sustainable systems for ageing in place (at home).
Suggested Citation
Hjorth, L., & Richardson, I. (2020). Older Adult and Animal Companionship during COVID-19: Pilot Study. Melbourne: RMIT University.
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People
Larissa Hjorth
Distinguished Professor and Director, Design and Creative Practice
School: Enabling Capability Platforms
Larissa Hjorth is a digital ethnographer, artist, Distinguished Professor and director of the Design & Creative Practice ECP platform at RMIT University. With Professor Heather Horst, she co-founded the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC). Previously, Hjorth was Deputy Dean, Research & Innovation, in the School of Media & Communication (2013−2016). Hjorth served on the inaugural Australian Research Council (ARC) Engagement & Impact Pilot study assessment panel for humanities and creative practice.
Hjorth studies the socio-cultural dimensions of mobile media and play practices in the Asia-Pacific region with an emphasis on interdisciplinary, collaborative and cross-cultural approaches. She has published a dozen co-authored books, edited over a dozen Handbooks/Companions and has over 40 journal articles.
More recently, Hjorth’s work has become concerned with how we can bring creative, social and design solutions to the growing ageing populations and, in turn, how we might consider scenarios of what it means to die well. She is also studying how our “more-than-human” companions can teach us about new media in everyday life. Hjorth’s last book, Haunting Hands (Oxford Uni Press) looked at how mobile media is being deployed in situations of grief and trauma, her previous book explored how art practice can teach us new acumen into the climate change debate.
Hjorth’s books include Haunting Hands (with Cumiskey 2017), Screen Ecologies (with Pink, Sharp & Williams 2016), Digital Ethnography (Pink et al. 2016) Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (2009), Games & Gaming (2010), Online@AsiaPacific (with Arnold 2013), Understanding Social Media (with Hinton 2013), and Gaming in Locative, Social and Mobile Media (with Richardson 2014).
Ingrid Richardson
Professor
School: Media and Communication
Professor Ingrid Richardson has been teaching, supervising and researching in the fields of digital media, mobile media and games for over twenty years. She has a broad interest in the human-technology relation and has published widely on the phenomenology of games and mobile media, digital ethnography and innovative research methods, the relation between technology use and wellbeing, and the cultural effects of urban screens, wearable technologies, virtual and augmented reality, remix culture and web-based content creation and distribution. Ingrid has led or co-led 14 funded research projects, the most recent being an ARC DP [Games of Being Mobile] with Larissa Hjorth. She is contributing co-editor of Studying Mobile Media (Routledge, 2011) and co-author of Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media (Palgrave, 2014), Ambient Play (MIT, 2020), Understanding Games and Game Cultures (Sage, 2020), Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity (Palgrave, forthcoming), and Mobile Media and the Urban Night (Palgrave, forthcoming). Ingrid brings ten years’ experience in university-level HDR management and during this time has actively championed and supported creative methods and practice-led postgraduate research. Over the past five years she has also developed a passion for teaching critical web literacy skills to undergraduate students across all disciplines.
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