RESIDENTIAL CARE AIDES’ EXPERIENCES OF PERSONHOOD IN DEMENTIA CARE SETTINGS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conceptually, person-centred care entails fostering the personhood of residents and the residential care aides (RCAs) who provide much of their hands-on care. Yet, to date, staff personhood has been overlooked in the empirical literature. Drawing on data from a larger ethnographic study examining the influence of the organizational and physical care environment on dementia care provision, this paper explores RCAs’ experiences of personhood. In-depth interviews with 29 staff (21 RCAs, 3 LPNs and 5 managers), and more than 230 hours of participant observation, were conducted in two Canadian nursing homes with specialized dementia units. Two overarching themes, ‘personhood undermined – management-staff relations’ and ‘personhood undermined – workplace policies and practices’ illustrate how, despite exposure to features believed beneficial to their working environment (e.g., smaller staffing ratios, relatively good remuneration, manageable workloads), RCAs encountered repeated affronts to their personhood. The first theme encompasses the importance of being known (i.e., as persons and of their job demands) and valued (i.e., appreciated for their work in non-monetary terms). The second highlights the salience of work-life balance, full staffing coverage, supportive human resource practices, and information sharing. RCAs’ experiences reveal how the ongoing search for cost-efficiencies, cost-containment, and cost-accountability overshadows their individuality, indicating a key disconnect between conceptual ideals and workplace realities. Organizations seeking to provide quality dementia care are encouraged to focus on the creation of person-centred management and workplace practices thereby providing tangible evidence that RCAs, and their work, matter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".