Design Empowerment For Older Adults

Ageing is commonly considered as a serious social problem. Older adults are often regarded as the consumers of social welfare rather than creators and they are thought to be "incapable" and "worthless". This article advocated a strength-oriented or empowerment-oriented perspective. Based on different empowerment models, this paper proposed an influence and process model of empowerment. It provided a framework to map the strengths of "incapable" people (as traditionally believed) and barriers to empowering them, and a practical reference to take action for empowerment during which participation was emphasized. Cases of empowerment for older people was introduced and analyzed following the framework of the model by which we provided a reference of empowerment-oriented practice for researchers and practitioners.