Lived experience of ageing and later life in older people with intellectual disability

Older people with intellectual disability (ID) are a growing population in Sweden as in the rest of the western world. The challenges to understand what it means to be old for an individual who have lived her whole life with ID need to be addressed. The aim of this study is to explore how older people ID who live in group accommodations describe their lived experience in relation to ageing and later life. The study has a phenomenological approach, based on the concept of life-world. Individual qualitative interviews were conducted with twelve people (five men, seven women) with ID, between 48 to 71 years (m=64), who lived in four different group accommodations in southern Sweden. A semi-structured interview guide was used. The descriptive phenomenological analysis method used discloses a structure consisting of themes and subthemes. The findings of the study reveal the informants’ lived experience of ageing and later life as a multifaceted phenomenon expressed through the two themes “Age as a process of change” and “Existential aspects of ageing” and six substantializing subthemes. The own body is essential for both how ageing and becoming old is experienced and for how this experience are expressed. The study also finds social, cultural and historical dimensions of the life-world to be important in the informants’ experience of ageing and later life and manifest the existence of a collective life-world for older people with ID, being the unique experiences that the informants share because of their disability and its life course consequences.