NRNP 6547 Week 2 Life-History Interview Example

A Day in His Own Time: A Life-History Interview With an 84-Year-Old Former Tool-and-Die Maker

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NRNP 6547: The Aging Experience

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Day in His Own Time: A Life-History Interview With an 84-Year-Old Former Tool-and-Die Maker

About This Record

The man interviewed is a composite built for teaching: an 84-year-old widower who worked for 41 years as a tool-and-die maker and lives alone in the house he bought in 1971. The interview asked him to describe an ordinary day. His answers are kept at his pace, including a long stretch about a radio program that has no clinical bearing, because removing it would edit his day into a symptom list. Times are his, not converted into clock hours. The interviewer's questions are printed in full, and one is marked as leading.

Morning

Interviewer: "Tell me about a usual day, from when you wake up."

He: "I wake up when the furnace kicks on. Always have. Then I lie there till the paper hits the porch, because there's no sense getting up before there's something to read. I put the coffee on, and I read the paper at the kitchen table, the whole thing, obituaries first. My wife used to say that was morbid. I say it's the news that matters at my age."

Interviewer: "What happens after the paper?"

He: "Second cup. Then I do my pills, the ones in the box my daughter fills. Then, if my knee lets me, I go out to the garage."

Interviewer: "Is the knee hard to manage in the mornings? [Note: this question is leading. It assumed the knee was a problem before he said so, and it shifted the conversation toward his body. It is kept here rather than deleted so a reader can see its effect on the answer.]"

He: "Well, some mornings, sure. But I wasn't going to talk about the knee. I was going to talk about the garage."

The Garage and the Radio

Interviewer: "Tell me about the garage."

He: "I've got my old bench out there, and a lathe I bought when the shop closed. I make things for the grandkids: a birdhouse, a little truck. My hands aren't what they were, so it takes me three mornings to do what used to take one. I listen to the radio while I work. There's a program on the public station, oldies, from after the news until the neighbor's car goes, the woman across the street who works days. That's how I know it's lunch. The fellow who hosts it, he plays swing on Tuesdays and country on Thursdays, and he tells a story about every record: where the band played, who married who. I called in once, years ago, to request a Glenn Miller tune my wife liked, and he played it and said her name. I still have the tape somewhere. I don't care much for the country, but I leave it on Thursdays anyway, because it's his program and I'd miss him."

Afternoon and Evening

Interviewer: "What happens after the neighbor's car goes?"

He: "Lunch, soup mostly. Then I sit in the chair and I'll drift off, twenty minutes or an hour, depends. My daughter calls when she's on her break, and I tell her I'm fine."

Interviewer: "And are you?"

He: "Mostly. Evenings are the long part. After supper there's nothing to do but the television, and the house is quiet in a way it wasn't. I go to bed when the news is over. I used to wait for her to finish her crossword."

Two Subjects He Moved Away From

Twice he steered the conversation elsewhere. When asked how he gets groceries, he said, "Oh, it gets done," and returned to the garage; later, it emerged that he no longer drives and depends on his daughter, which he may experience as a loss he does not want to name. When the interviewer mentioned his wife's illness, he said only "that was a hard year" and asked whether the interviewer wanted more coffee. These are recorded as subjects he moved away from, not as gaps to be filled next time, because the right to steer an interview is part of what it means to be the one telling the story. Butler (1963) described reminiscence in later life as a natural and often valuable process of reviewing one's life, not a symptom, and it proceeds on the teller's terms.

What the Record Shows

His day has a structure built from the furnace, the paper, the radio program, the neighbor's car, and the evening news. Its meaning comes from work with his hands, a connection to his grandchildren, and the rituals he kept with his wife. A version of this interview that asked only about symptoms would have produced a knee, a nap, and a lonely evening, and it would have missed that the garage is the center of his day. His ability to keep that center depends as much on his surroundings, a bench at the right height, a daughter who drives, a radio host he feels he knows, as on his knee, which is the distinction the World Health Organization draws between intrinsic capacity and functional ability (World Health Organization, 2015). Assumptions about what older people talk about, or should talk about, shape what interviewers hear (Levy, 2009); the leading question in this record is a small example of that.

References

Butler, R. N. (1963). The life review: An interpretation of reminiscence in the aged. Psychiatry, 26(1), 65-76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1963.11023339

Levy, B. (2009). Stereotype embodiment: A psychosocial approach to aging. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(6), 332-336. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01662.x

World Health Organization. (2015). World report on ageing and health. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565042