The aim of this thesis was to explore, describe and understand elderly people's experience of well-being, based on interviews and narratives and told in situ at nursing homes. This thesis is based on two studies, I) Elderly people’s descriptions of becoming and being respite care recipients. II) Elderly women’s subjective sense of well-being from their course of life perspective. Methods used were interviews conducted with 20 older residents whose experiences and stories form the basis of the results. The method was qualitative and the interviews were conducted in the form of casual conversations (Study I), and was analyzed by content analysis, and narrative method (Study II), which was analyzed using dialogic performative analysis.

In substantial, this thesis contributes to an understanding of how elderly people living in nursing homes experience and describe their well-being. They did this by specifying different qualitative values for well-being. The first value indicates well-being that is (i) to retain their autonomy through self-determination and participation in everyday life decisions regardless of accommodation. The second value indicates (ii) the need for continuity of one's identity, and the third one (iii) dealt with being an individual along with others, i.e. the notion of the ego strength is important when to assert their individuality, but this notion is simultaneously dependent on the interaction with others. This identity is based on the experience in life and the individual experiences of relationships with other people, where relationships with family members are the relationship's innermost core. At the nursing home, identity-based experience is based on the relationship with the nursing aids. Well-being is described as a total experience regardless of physical ability, in the context of residential care which constitutes both a home and a care institution.

From a theoretical viewpoint this thesis contributes to knowledge of a caring scientific perspective on well-being, with a foundation in the elderly’s experiences of well-being, autonomy and continuity of identity. The study contributes to knowledge here called Interactionistic Caring Science, and it provides insights into the complexity of the experience of well-being in the nursing home described by these elderly people as interactively and situated produced (in situ).

Practically, this thesis contributes knowledge about how the well-being of elderly people can be supported in caring situations at nursing home, which are both a home and a health care institution.

The conclusion show that the elderly are becoming very dependent on other people to experience their wellness. This, as the elderly often have weak intrinsic activity and health and suffer from lack of their own ability to act, this makes relations and interactions an important part of nursing and nursing acts, and even more important for old people. This in turn requires increased knowledge by caregivers about this interactive meaning of caring, i.e. how people interacts in a dynamic relationship with their environment, both physiologically and psychologically, despite weak intrinsic activity and health. The old person’s dependence in their nursing aides makes those relations and interactions of even more importance in the nursing caring and in the nursing acts of the elderly.

The number of older people in the western world is increasing. Advancing age creates the need for care, including respite care. The aim of this study is to describe the experience of older people of becoming and being respite care recipients. Admission to respite care is a response to a range of practicalities in the home, such as the need to maintain privacy, dissatisfaction with home care, and deterioration in health. However, the participants in this study had little or no involvement in the decision regarding respite care placement. Activities, training, and medical treatment were found to be important to respite care recipients’ satisfaction with their care.

In this article, we are concerned with narratives of elderly women's well-being from their perspectives of the latter parts of their life, living at special housing accommodation (SHA) in the context of Swedish elderly care. In focusing on narratives about well-being, we have a two-fold focus: (1) how the elderly women create their own identity and meaning-making based on lifetime experience; and (2) how narratives of well-being are reflected through the filter of life in situ at the SHA. Based on empirical data consisting of well-being narratives, a dialogical performance analysis was undertaken. The results show how relationships with important persons during various stages of life, and being together and enjoying fellowship with other people as well as enjoying freedom and self-determination, are central aspects of well-being. The conclusions drawn are that the characteristic phenomena of well-being (the what) in the narratives are continuity, identity, and sociality for the elderly person, and this is manifested (the how) as a question of contrasting the state of self-management and self-decline.