Creative Journeys Report 2019

28 Creative Journeys Enjoying each other’s company, doing something together. (Stage one resident) They absolutely loved it… All the residents that took part had a wonderful, wonderful time and experience. (Stage one staff member) In addition to sharing the new experiences of participating in the activities, residents also discovered common interests as they shared past experiences and their histories. These were sometimes about where they lived or worked or what they liked to do before they lived in the care home, but it could also sometimes be about the arts themselves, which was articulated across both stage one and stage two. For example, in one of the observed Age Exchange sessions two residents discovered that they had both worked in Woolworths, and in another observed session two residents discovered they had both lived in Cornwall when they were younger (for one resident this was where she was evacuated during the war and the other lived there for all of her childhood). Once you’ve got a group of them down, and you’re doing something that all of them like, then it’s going to make more communication for them. So, they’re going to talk about things. I think one lady, she did dressmaking when she was younger. Then, we were speaking to another lady who was a tailor, so they became really good friends because they’ve gone to an activity, started talking about what they did, and then they were inseparable. Because they’ve so much in common. They wouldn’t have known it unless they’d come to the ongoing activity. (Stage two staff member) We have a resident who is fairly new who used to teach art and examples of her art work have been displayed around the care home. Her family have very kindly brought in china Easter eggs and our resident and her family are going to teach china painting to some of the other r esiden ts. (Survey respondent) 4.2.3 Social connectedness Social connectivity is linked to social isolation, social networks and relationships in that as people age and their health declines social networks can shrink and for older people living in residential care there may be reduced opportunities for participation in social life. Social connections can be relational or collective; that is people may define themselves in terms of how they connect with other individuals or with a group (Pearce et al., 2016). Following Pearce et al. (2016) we used a measure of relational bonding and a measure of collective bonding to look at social connectedness in the case study participants and try to determine whether participating in the arts activities had a measurable impact as to how connected people felt to individuals and the group at the beginning of the programme compared with at the end. Though these measures captured bonding with some staff members, mainly activities coordinators, they were predominantly focused on relationships between residents and the findings are therefore presented here: