Abstract:

Social service, which fights all forms of discrimination that make people disadvantaged, expects social service experts, who are members of the profession, to be the leaders of this struggle. The protection of the rights of the elderly who are one of the groups in which social services professionals work and are served, and the provision of well-being, first of all, is the elimination of age discrimination. The age discrimination on which people are exposed only due to age is produced by unconsciously adopted patterns, like other forms of discrimination. Therefore, the fight against age discrimination should begin with efforts to eliminate the subject patterns. This study was carried out with the acknowledgement that the social services department students should gain awareness of their patterns of ageing. In the study, the University of Hacettepe, after the studies carried out in the framework of a mandatory course of the Social Service Program, the student’s discoveries about the patterns were applied reflective diaries. The content analysis of the reflective diaries has reached the first two topics, “generalizations for the elderly population” and the second “memorial assessments for their lives”. As a result, it has been shown that students have discovered their patterns of aging and have developed a consciousness that these judgments need to be converted.

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