Viewing and making art together: a multi-session art-gallery-based intervention for people with dementia and their carers

Objectives: This is the first known study that sought to understand the experience of an eight-week art-gallery-based intervention offered at two distinctly different galleries for people with mild to moderate dementia and their carers. The study examined impact on social inclusion, carer burden, and quality of life and daily living activities for a person with dementia. Method: A mixed-methods pre-post design using standardised questionnaires and interviews involved 24 participants (12 with dementia) and compared similar interventions at a traditional and a contemporary art gallery. Qualitative data was analysed using thematic analysis. Results: No significant pre-post difference was found between the traditional or contemporary gallery groups on quantitative measures. There was, however, a non-significant trend towards a reduction in carer burden over the course of the intervention for both gallery groups. Thematic analysis revealed well-being benefits from both traditional and contemporary art gallery sites that included positive social impact resulting from feeling more socially included, self-reports of enhanced cognitive capacities for people with dementia, and an improved quality of life. Conclusion: Participants were unanimous in their enjoyment and satisfaction with the programme, despite the lack of significance from standardised measures. Further consideration of art galleries and museums, as non-clinical community resources for dementia care, is warranted. The interventions at both galleries helped to foster social inclusion and social engagement, enhance the caring relationship between the carers and PWD, support the personhood of PWD, and stimulate cognitive processes of attention and concentration

Looking back at Social Knowledge in the Making

Sociolog

Effects of a museum-based social prescription intervention on quantitative measures of psychological wellbeing in older adults

Aims: To assess psychological wellbeing in a novel social prescription intervention for older adults called Museums on Prescription and to explore the extent of change over time in six self-rated emotions (‘absorbed’, ‘active’, ‘cheerful’, ‘encouraged’, ‘enlightened’ and ‘inspired’). Methods: Participants (n = 115) aged 65–94 years were referred to museum-based programmes comprising 10 weekly sessions, by healthcare and third sector organisations using inclusion criteria (e.g. socially isolated, able to give informed consent, not in employment, not regularly attending social or cultural activities) and exclusion criteria (e.g. unable to travel to the museum, unable to function in a group situation, unlikely to be able to attend all sessions, unable to take part in interviews and complete questionnaires). In a within-participants’ design, the Museum Wellbeing Measure for Older Adults (MWM-OA) was administered pre-post session at start-, mid- and end-programme. A total of 12 programmes, facilitated by museum staff and volunteers, were conducted in seven museums in central London and across Kent. In addition to the quantitative measures, participants, carers where present, museum staff and researchers kept weekly diaries following guideline questions and took part in end-programme in-depth interviews. Results: Multivariate analyses of variance showed significant participant improvements in all six MWM-OA emotions, pre-post session at start-, mid- and end-programme. Two emotions, ‘absorbed’ and ‘enlightened’, increased pre-post session disproportionately to the others; ‘cheerful’ attained the highest pre-post session scores whereas ‘active’ was consistently lowest. Conclusion: Museums can be instrumental in offering museum-based programmes for older adults to improve psychological wellbeing over time. Participants in the study experienced a sense of privilege, valued the opportunity to liaise with curators, visit parts of the museum closed to the public and handle objects normally behind glass. Participants appreciated opportunities afforded by creative and co-productive activities to acquire learning and skills, and get to know new people in a different context

Theorising how art gallery interventions impact people with dementia and their caregivers

Dementia refers to a variety of diseases that are characterised by cognitive difficulties and an overall decline in daily living skills. Psychologically-informed arts and health programmes may be particularly beneficial ways of improving the lives of people with dementia and their caregivers. This study sought to better understand how programmes at contemporary and traditional art galleries might play a role in the lives of people with dementia. Participants included 12 people with mild to moderate dementia, their 12 caregivers and 4 gallery facilitators. Those with dementia and their caregivers were engaged in art-viewing followed by art-making over an 8 week period. Data, collected through post-intervention interviews with participants, field notes and extensive written communication between the facilitators and research team, were analysed using grounded theory methodology to theorise how gallery-based interventions affect people with dementia and those who care for them. The emerging theory has four primary components: the art gallery is seen as being a physically-valued place that provides intellectual stimulation and offers opportunities for social inclusion that can change how dementia is perceived. These components coalesced to create positive emotional and relational effects for those with dementia and caregivers. The resulting theory has potential implications for the use of gallery-based programmes in dementia care within public health, healthcare and museum/art gallery policy and practice

‘But it makes me uncomfortable’: The challenges and opportunities of research poetry

Along with all the arts, poetry offers creative and expressive possibilities to writers and to audience members. But perhaps poetry, more than any art form, also triggers more uncomfortableness in how to “read” it, more uncertainty about what a poem “means”, and stirs up long-ago unpleasant memories of school experiences writing, memorising, reciting and analysing classroom creations. Poetry suffers, claims Roach (Citation2016), from not being taught well, but also suffers from overly detailed analysis that can reward complex and arcane interpretation, leading to a sense of alienation among those trying to understand what a poem means. When the terms “poetic inquiry” or “research poetry” are added, eyes might gloss over and (many) researchers might run to “safer” art forms and methodologies. And for those who want a definitive interpretation of a poem (e.g. Ferber, Citation2019), or a stanza or even a line, poetry will cause you problems. The argument being that for some a poem can only be interpreted knowing what the writer intended and as readers “we do our best to imagine … what the writer intended” (Ferber, Citation2019, p. 142). For others, however, poetry “contains a multiplicity of meanings” and there is no, singularly correct, unambiguous interpretation (Lotter, Citationn.d..). Bringing our own subjective experiences to reading and listening to poetry, I would argue, is part of the strength and challenge of poetry for arts and health researchers

Toward wellbeing: creativity and resilience in the life and work of Madge Gill

It may be tempting to look at aspects of Madge Gill’s life and her responses to the many difficulties she experienced, and then to speculate about possible mental health problems and retrospectively formulate a specific psychiatric diagnosis. To do so, however, would not be a scientific approach to understanding her life, nor would it necessarily be a principled way to try and comprehend who she was and why art-making, Spiritualism and being a medium were so very important to her. Like many people, Madge Gill had problems and deficiencies but to use the magnifying glass of psychoanalysis or other psychological theories in order to psychopathologise her by focusing on deficits, as often occurs in the study of artists, would construct a circuitous cul-de-sac that fails to examine her resilience, creativity and strengths. On the seesaw of life almost everyone faces some degree of psychological, social and physical challenges on the one hand, but we also possess and can develop psychological, social and physical resources to balance out the challenges and help create some sort of equilibrium and obtain a sense of subjective wellbeing . It is through the perspective of developmental psychology along with considering wellbeing theory as a type of equilibrium responding to the challenges and resources one faces and possesses, that we can begin to look at the life of Madge Gill and to try to understand the roles creativity and art-making had in the life and work of this enigmatic Londoner

Technology and restructuring the social field of dairy farming : hybrid capitals, ‘stockmanship’ and automatic milking systems

This paper draws on research exploring robotic and information technologies in livestock agriculture. Using Automatic Milking Systems (AMS) as an example we use the work of Bourdieu to illustrate how technology can be seen as restructuring the practices of dairy farming, the nature of what it is to be a dairy farmer, and the wider field of dairy farming. Approaching technology in this way and by drawing particularly upon the ‘thinking tools’ (Grenfell, 2008) of Pierre Bourdieu, namely field, capital and habitus, the paper critically examines the relevance of Bourdieu’s thought to the study of technology. In the heterogeneous agricultural context of dairy farming, we expand on Bourdieu’s types of capital to define what we have called ‘hybrid’ capital involving human-cow-technology collectives. The concept of hybrid capital expresses how the use of a new technology can shift power relations within the dairy field, affecting human-animal relations and changing the habitus of the stock person. Hybrid capital is produced through a co-investment of stock keepers, cows and technologies, and can become economically and culturally valuable within a rapidly restructuring dairying field when invested in making dairy farming more efficient and changing farmers’ social status and work-life balance. The paper shows how AMS and this emergent hybrid capital is associated with new but contested definitions of what counts as ‘good’ dairy farming practice, and with the emergence of new modes of dairy farmer habitus, within a wider dairy farming field whose contours are being redrawn through the implementation of new robotic and information technologies

Observing mentalizing art therapy groups for people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder

This article describes video-based observation of three mentalization-based treatment (MBT) art therapy groups in services for people who have received a diagnosis of personality disorder.Four focus groups (service user researchers, MBT trained psychologists, MBT trained art therapists, and the three art therapists who submitted videos) developed descriptions of the practice they observed on video. A grounded theory method was used to develop a proposition that if the art therapist uses art to demonstrate their attention, this tends to help potentially chaotic and dismissive groups to cooperate, whereas if the art therapist gives the appearance of passivity, it tends to increase the problematic interactions in the group

Conceptualising what we mean by ‘wellbeing’ in the dementias

The term ‘wellbeing’ has experienced a relatively rapid introduction into the lexicon and policy of healthcare in the UK and other countries. Wellbeing research now occurs across different disciplines and clinical populations. Less well understood, however, is how wellbeing is conceptualised, measured and recognised in the dementias and during art activities and how this understanding might impact research and future practice. This paper will firstly, review prevailing wellbeing conceptualisations in order to understand their relevance to dementia and secondly, discuss novel psychological and physiological approaches used to measure and observe wellbeing in art and heritage activities in this population