Interview from an Older Adult



Interview from an Older Adult

Introduction

Life is certainly a wonderful gift and it is a compact of everything in the form of love, bliss, hope, sorrow, laughter, despair challenges and all the other things that make a human carry on living. The life begins in this world with the birth of the human and soon after the birth he/she starts taking influence from his/her social environment, as human is regarded as a social animal (Kramer, 1985). Then human being goes through various stages of the life and finally in the end becomes an older adult by striking the age of 65-70. Throughout the life-span from an infant to the older adult, he/she experiences a lot of incidents in the life either happy moments or sorrowful. In this paper, there will an interview be conducted to an older adult who will be above 68 years old in order to examine the entire life experiences of an individual from social and psychological perspectives.

Figure: Eight Life-Stages a Man goes Through (Source: Google Image)

The older adult that is chosen here for interviewing is Nallely Viramontes, who has also been a student of University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, USA. She is a female and has been of 70 years old this March. The interview with her was conducted a week before on April 15th, 2013 at her home by scheduling a pre-planned interview. She is a very good lady and was much concerned for being an interviewee in order to share her all life experiences with us (as an interviewer). By physical features, she was portrayed as a normal-weighted and cheerful lady with grey hairs and wearing spectacles with thick frames and with a chain hanging. Her height was about 5.2 feet and she was wearing a trouser and a loose shirt at the time of interview. By speech and mannerism, she was depicting a highly sophisticated and ethical manner, and she was speaking in a very polite way or we can say there was an impact of older age in her voice.

Family Characteristics

Family of Origin

For this, I will refer the older lady interviewed as Nallely. She was born in a tiny town of California and was the eldest of one brother and two sisters, who all matured in the same town as Nallely. Both of parents of Nallely passed away prior to her fifteenth birthday, her mother was died at a relatively young age as she had suffered from tuberculosis and just few months after the death of her mother, his father also died in a serious incident at his job. Nallely did her primary schooling from a small school of that town as the source of income of her father was not sound so that she could not go to any large school of city. Her father was just a sort of labor in a small factory of that town. She belonged to the religion of catholic. After the death of her both parents, the sole ...