Data set comprising interviews with a range of stakeholders including: care-based hairdressers, people with dementia, informal carers, care workers and other practitioners and key informants.This research will explore the role that hairdressing plays in the lives of older people who are high-level users of health and social care. This will include investigating the formal/paid services provided by hairdressers, and the styling and management of hair undertaken by care workers. There are four main aims to this research: to describe the experience of hairdressing and explore the significance it holds for older service users to describe the workplace experience of care-based hairdressers and care workers to scrutinise and document the constituent elements of hairdressing encounters to consider patterns of provision, access and affordability of hairdressing services to older service users. This ethnographic study will be conducted over three types of setting: care received at home, long-stay hospital care settings and care homes. It will include observations and filming in care-based salons as well as interviews with care workers, hairdressers and older service users. The findings will inform policy and practices in care and raise the profile of body-work that is fundamental to well-being and the avoidance of decline, depression and neglect. The study addresses an aspect of care settings that is little understood and for which no evidence-base currently exists

This was a qualitatively led mixed method investigation. Methods included in-depth interviewing, observation, filming, telephone survey and discussion groups.