Intergenerational Programs

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
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