For the observation sessions, I completed one in Colonial Williamsburg for 30 minutes, and decided that I would benefit more from doing a different session online watching videos. I will start this blog with what was difficult. Our group’s focus for this project is on retirement communities in big cities. Obviously, it is unrealistic to think we could go to a big city to observe at a retirement community, and one of the other members in my group was observing in a retirement community already, so I originally elected to observe in Colonial Williamsburg. I believed that with all the elderly in Williamsburg, a Sunday morning in Colonial Williamsburg may provide good insight into elderly behavior and their habits. I was mistaken. There were significantly less elderly then I believed there would be in Colonial Williamsburg, and the few who I did see went to mostly restaurants. As entertaining as it is to watch two of the 5 elderly people I saw sip coffee, it wasn’t what I was looking to learn, and I quickly realized I was not going to get much out of this observation.
For my second attempt at an observation I looked up videos about retirement homes on the internet. The main issue with doing this was that there were a lot of retirement home videos that came up in searches, but finding the very useful and relevant videos were difficult. I found that in between very informative videos such as one that discussed an all Indian retirement community, there were videos of retirement communities doing Harlem shake videos. Another very difficult part of my online search was finding videos that were related to retirement communities in big cities. Big city retirement communities are a market that is relatively untapped, so finding videos about it was very difficult. What was interesting and useful about my online video search though, was that I did find a big variety of videos. I found videos that were floor layouts, and I found videos that showed me how a student at Drake college lived in a retirement home and how this was very beneficial to both parties. Overall, my online search was very useful and stimulating. I developed a lot of new ideas and research questions from simply watching the big variety off videos that I found.