Garnham Bridget, Bryant Lia
Centre for Social Change, School of Psychology, Social Work & Social Policy, University of South, Australia.
J Aging Stud. 2017 Apr;41:52-59. doi: 10.1016/j.jaging.2017.04.001. Epub 2017 Apr 20.
The academic field of literature pertaining to elder abuse emerges largely from gerontology with contributions from a variety of disciplines including geriatric medicine, nursing, public health, law, psychology, sociology and social work. This paper presents a critical review of articles drawn from this literature to identify current directions leading the development of empirical research in this field. The objective measurement of prevalence, the identification and correlation of psycho-social risk factors and practice-based research oriented to intervention and prevention are identified as privileged sites for scientific investigation. These sites are critically analysed in terms of their underpinning rationalities to reveal the operation of a hegemonic post-positivist epistemological framework. This framework enables an expert professional discourse to structure knowledge and the field of inquiry through constructions of the 'subject of abuse' as a statistical figure, a factorial subject of risk and universally vulnerable. These modes of representation preclude subjective lived experience and, in doing so, inaugurate an 'epistemological erasure' of the embodied subject of abuse. The review attends to the limited body of qualitative research in the field, some of which claims a politicized empiricism of 'voice'. However, whilst the findings produced by this research suggest theoretically and conceptually fertile lines of inquiry, these have not disrupted or extended the dominant discourses in the field. This paper argues that an epistemological gulf, riven through a politics of evidence, ensures the reproduction of dominant discourses and their attendant limitations in ways that forestall the conceptual and theoretical advancement of the field.
与虐待老年人相关的文献学术领域主要源自老年学，同时也有来自包括老年医学、护理、公共卫生、法律、心理学、社会学和社会工作等多个学科的贡献。本文对该文献中的文章进行了批判性综述，以确定引领该领域实证研究发展的当前方向。对患病率的客观测量、心理社会风险因素的识别与关联以及以干预和预防为导向的基于实践的研究被确定为科学调查的优先领域。本文对这些领域进行了批判性分析，依据其背后的合理性来揭示霸权后实证主义认识论框架的运作。这个框架通过将“受虐主体”构建为一个统计数字、一个风险因素主体以及普遍易受伤害的主体，使专家专业话语能够构建知识和探究领域。这些表征模式排除了主观的生活经历，从而开创了对受虐主体的“认识论抹除”。该综述关注该领域有限的定性研究，其中一些研究主张一种“声音”的政治化经验主义。然而，尽管这项研究产生的结果表明了在理论和概念上富有成效的探究方向，但这些并没有扰乱或扩展该领域的主导话语。本文认为，通过证据政治形成的认识论鸿沟，确保了主导话语的再生产及其伴随的局限性，从而阻碍了该领域的概念和理论进步。
