Intergenerational Programs

Book excerpt: Intergenerational Programs: Understanding What We Have Created focuses on research efforts to design, improve, and evaluate activities among younger and older individuals while examining how intergenerational activities impact children, families, and older adult participants. The first single volume to reflect the current state of research knowledge in this area, this vital guide provides practitioners, program developers, researchers, and students with case studies, research findings, and models and examples of productive activities. It will help you guide short- and long-term program development, document activity effectiveness, and ensure program survival during fiscal hardships to give participants constructive and positive experiences. Discussing the opportunity to transfer experience and knowledge of older persons in our society to future generations, Intergenerational Programs: Understanding What We Have Created examines the challenges that may arise in providing meaningful activities for younger and older persons. This helpful book explores research methods, such as qualitative approaches with large, national data sets; observations; program histories; and qualitative analyses of interviews with small numbers of program participants to help you create appropriate activities and foster interdependence between these two age groups. Intergenerational Programs: Understanding What We Have Created will help you research programs and produce successful activity outcomes with such techniques as: using an ethnographic approach, involving a holistic perspective and using field-based data collection methods, to meet the challenges of creating programs among two different age groups and the social problems each group faces using constructivist and sociocultural orientations, which are traditionally applied to a “classroom learning,” to offer new ways of viewing and assessing learning in community-based programs understanding the positive effects grandparents can have on their grandchildren, including helping parents resolve children's behavioral problems and assisting in providing positive environments incorporating knowledge of drug abuse issues, problem-solving skills, feelings of self-worth, and academic goals into programs to benefit youths developing elder-care services in conjunction with businesses to improve the quality of life for the elderly and the workers, as well as decreasing workers’absenteeism, mistakes, and time used to make personal calls to elderly relatives who need careComprehensive and intelligent, this current book contains studies and research that explore the negative and positive aspects of certain activities, allowing you to learn from the experiences of others. This book provides research methods and evaluation measures to help you decide what kinds of activities are needed in order to best benefit participants. As a result, you will be able to create relevant programs, assess their effectiveness, and help join different generations in working together for an improved quality of life for all group members.