June 23 Snippets

Posted by on 26 June 2023

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HOPE scholar Jenny Song has interviewed older Chinese people to gain a holistic understanding of their perceptions and experiences of ageing and health. Jenny is impressed by the various adaptive mechanisms that older Chinese people have employed to cope with the challenges they may encounter in a new cultural and social environment.

Photo by Hanxiao on Unsplash

Jenny explains:

“I want to maintain the ‘distance of a bowl of hot soup’ with my son,” an older Chinese lady told me during the interview.  She further explained that the “distance of a bowl of hot soup” symbolises the act of her son sending a bowl of hot soup from his residence to her home, and the soup remains warm when it reaches her hands. This Chinese saying is a vivid metaphor for an expected family relationship that should be measured by warmth (intimacy), rather than physical distance. The “distance of a bowl of hot soup’ allows older people to be independent and have their own space while still maintaining a close relationship with their children.

Jenny is doing her PhD at University of Waikato and is supervised by Professor Matthew Parsons and Professor Allison Kirkman. 


Part of the PhD process is publishing study results. HOPE scholar Khalid Bin Abdul Jabbar, has recently published his 1st paper which validates a method using accelerometers to determine if a person is sitting, lying down or upright.

This is important for Khalid’s work to move to the next step in his project which is using the validated algorithm to analyze the real-world seven day’s accelerometry data of our community-dwelling older adults. This second step would provide valuable insights to the physical activity patterns of our seniors.

This work is part of the Ageing Well Through Eating, Sleeping, Socialising and Mobile (AWESSoM) study with adults older than 75 years.

Khalid is doing his PhD at University of Auckland and is supervised by Professor Ngaire Kerse.


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