Public opinion regarding the organization of welfare and elder care, as well as how the right to care is articulated, are issues that have mainly been studied as expressions of individual attitudes or conflicting ideologies. By contrast, and departing from an understanding of the importance of context and societal rhetoric, this study is designed as a case study of the rhetorical landscape of elder care in public discourse in Sweden. The study circles around a TV documentary about problems in elder care that was aired in early 2020, just before the pandemic. The analysis focuses on how the issues were framed in the documentary but also on how different actors in news media and on the TV-channels Facebook page reacted to the claims in the documentary and how different actors used the documentary for their own aims.

The study departs from a discourse analytical perspective and the analytical focus is on how the rights to elder care and the rights of users of elder care are articulated in relation to what the problems of the organization of elder are represented to be.