Reminiscence and Digital Storytelling to Improve the Social and Emotional Well-Being of Older Adults With Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Study Design and a Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Increasing attention is being given to the growing concerns about social isolation, loneliness, and compromised emotional well-being experienced by young adults and older individuals affected by Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD). Studies suggest that reminiscence strategies combined with an intergenerational approach may yield significant social and mental health benefits for participants. Experts also recommended the production of a digital life story book as part of reminiscence. Reminiscence is typically implemented by trained professionals (eg, social workers and nurses); however, there has been growing interest in using trained volunteers owing to staffing shortages and the costs associated with reminiscence programs. OBJECTIVE: The proposed study will develop and test how reminiscence offered by trained young adult volunteers using a digital storytelling platform may help older adults with ADRD to improve their social and emotional well-being. METHODS: The proposed project will conduct a randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of the intervention. The older and young adult participants will be randomly assigned to the intervention (reminiscence based) or control groups and then be randomly matched within each group. Data will be collected at baseline before the intervention, in the middle of the intervention, at end of the intervention, and at 3 months after the intervention. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design will be used to take advantage of the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative data from surveys will be entered into SPSS and analyzed using covariate-adjusted linear mixed models for repeated measures to compare the intervention and control groups over time on the major outcomes of participants. Conventional content analysis of qualitative interviews will be conducted using data analysis software. RESULTS: The project was modified to a telephone-based intervention owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data collection started in 2020 and ended in 2022. In total, 103 dyads were matched at the beginning of the intervention. Of the 103 dyads, 90 (87.4%) dyads completed the midtest survey and 64 (62.1%) dyads completed the whole intervention and the posttest survey. Although we are still cleaning and finalizing data analyses, the preliminary results from both quantitative and qualitative data showed promising results of this intergenerational reminiscence approach that benefits both the older adults who have cognitive impairments and the young adult participants. CONCLUSIONS: Intergenerational reminiscence provided by young adult college student offers promising benefits for both the younger and older generations. Future studies may consider scaling up this pilot into a trackable, replicable model that includes more participants with diverse background (eg, public vs private college students and older adults from other agencies) to test the effectiveness of this intervention for older adults with ADRD. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05984732; https://classic.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05984732. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/49752.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".