ABSTRACT
Nursing home residents are commonly depicted, by professional and lay people alike, with a set of negative stereotypes. While an elder’s physical dependency has supposedly “necessitated” institutionalization in the fi rst place, it is the negative stereotypes that become the frame through which institutionalized elders are labeled and perceived as a category. Nursing home residents also may be characterized by the increase in the proportion of locomotive and cognitive pathologies accompanying old age1 or by the “unloving care”2 that may represent society’s views of nursing homes. The purpose of the author’s study was to deconstruct the stigma of nursing home residents by returning to them what has been theirs all the time, namely, human agency.3 Through an examination of the care institution not only as a“last segregation”4 but also as a context for the production of new roles, this study sought to distinguish new identities and give new meaning5,6 to the chronically ill, the old, and the institutionalized.
