The experience of hope and aging: a hermeneutic photography study.

The purpose of this hermeneutic photography study was to explore how older adults lived hope in their day-to-day lives. A purposive sample of 12 older adults 65 and older was asked to photograph how they experienced and lived hope in their everyday lives. Participants were asked to select four to five photographs that best reflected their "lived hope," and these photographs were used as prompts for subsequent interviews. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis of the interviews and photographs, which revealed that these study participants lived a philosophy of hope in which hope provided a kind of landscape through which these older adults lived and made sense of their life experiences. Implications for helping nurses foster and make hope more visible for their older clients are suggested.