A list of tools is NOT enough! Professionals’ advice on how to implement a Core Outcome Set in practice

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Cutting Brussels sprouts: Collaboration involving persons with dementia

How people with dementia collaborate with other people is an area in need of more research and conceptualizations. Collaboration introduces a number of new possibilities and demands concerning cognitive and linguistic abilities and it is suggested that a theoretical framework that emphasize that cognitive resources are not exclusively individual, but are part of cognitive and communicative context. In this article focus is on joint activities and their collaborative organization is analyzed using an example involving persons with dementia working together with staff preparing a meal. The analysis shows that persons with dementia are able to collaborate in fairly advanced activities if they are supported in such a way that they can make use of the cognitive and linguistic resources of others, in particular cognitive functions having to do with planning and execution of actions. The organization of artifacts like kitchen tools can function as an external memory support. The results support a theoretical framework that help to understand what people can do together rather than focus on individual abilities. The results also indicate that is possible to learn how to organize collaboration involving persons with dementia by understanding how other persons abilities as well as artifacts can be used as external resources for support of cognitive and linguistic abilities.

Narratives in Illness: A Methodological Note

As a result of the general growth in the interest in narratives different conception of what a story is and how to analyze has emerged. One especially interesting and methodological relevant difference is between the conception of narratives as textual objects and narratives as part of a storytelling event. The paper discusses the theoretical differences between these two analytical approaches to narratives. An example from my own research on Alzheimer’s patients telling stories illustrate the possibilities of using a performative and micro ethnographic approach to the study of storytelling in order to understand the functions of narratives – especially in relation to identity work. If stories not only are thought of as representations of events it becomes possible to view stories and story telling as social action: social states are both established, negotiated and changed through stories. This is especially important in the field of health and illness where diseases almost always are embedded in conversations and the telling of why and how symptoms were discovered or traumas received. For many patients and persons with especially communicative disabilities story telling is a challenge, but also an opportunity to actually master, maintain and often transform their identities

Vad får man från ’socialen’? Sociala insatser vid socialbyråer i Stockholm

What do you get from the social welfare office? Measures taken at social welfare offices in Stockholm For two years 400 clients were studied with respect to the type of measure taken. There were four main types of measure. The majority of clients received social allowance at some occassion and some of them for a long period of time. Many clients also received “advice and support”, and measures which may be called “administrative”; for example help to seek support from other authorities, or advice how to seek such support. A small number of clients were placed at various institutions, some with coercion, others voluntarily. To a very large extent, clients turned to the social welfare office because of economic problems. That clients, above all, needed economic support was also the opinion of social workers, even though some of them had the ambition to do something about the clients social and psychic problems. Nothing in the study indicates that the social welfare offices and the social workers did perform, or were expected to perform, the task of changing the lives of clients. That is to say; social welfare offices and social workers seem to have worked as a factor inhibiting and interrupting long periods of dependence on social allowance. Social welfare offices seem to have fulfilled a complementary function: to give support when other sources of income and other social networks fail.Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv</p

Dementia, Embodied Memories, and the Self

Researchers in cognition and linguistics have in the last couple of decades argued that more complex memories of the kind often called episodic memories are embodied and are multimodal. This is something that is interesting in the field of persons living with, for example, neurodegenerative dementia. In this article the interest is on how bodily gestures can be used to make sense of episodic memories that cannot be verbally communicated by persons with dementia. Empirical examples are discussed with a focus on the use of bodily gestures and how the stories are connected to identities and a sense of self. A key conclusion is that embodied resources like bodily gestures can be used to construct and communicate a sense of self. It further indicates that modal aspects of memories are central in the communicative sense-making process. Finally, the examples demonstrate how embodied episodic memories can be used to present and sustain a sense of sel