Combining music and life story work to enhance participation in family interaction in semantic dementia: a longitudinal study of one family's experience.

Background: Semantic dementia is a rarer dementia, classified as a type of frontotemporal dementia and a variant of primary progressive aphasia. Studies examining conversation in this condition and interventions to enhance participation in family life present as gaps in the research literature. Methods: Working with one family on a longitudinal basis, this study used conversation analysis and narrative analysis to provide a detailed assessment of communication . This information was used to design an individually tailored life story intervention to facilitate family interaction: a co-produced life story music DVD. Results: This intervention offered the family a resource that allowed the person with semantic dementia to display areas of retained competence and enhanced participation in interaction in a way that was not typically present in everyday conversation. Conclusions: It is argued that fostering greater opportunities for such in-the-moment connections is an important goal for intervention, particularly when language may be significantly compromised

‘Whose story is it and what is it for?':Life story as critical discourse in dementia studies

This chapter is based on a transcribed online conversation about our experiences of life story work that took place in January 2022 between the authorship: Jackie, Aagje and John. The conversation was set-up and facilitated by the book editors. We were invited to take part in the conversation because of our positioning as academics/academic-practitioners who had been involved in life story work and dementia care for a number of years, but had approached the topic from different cultural values and disciplinary perspectives. During 2022 we subsequently analysed a transcript of our conversation and three separate, but inter-linked, themes emerged from this process, namely, (1) entangled life stories; (2) the value and ethics of life story work and (3) future life story work. It also became apparent that, retrospectively, the guiding question of our conversation was ‘Whose story is it and what is it for?' It is this retrospective, but overarching life story question, underpinned by extracts from our conversation assembled under each of the theme headings, which are explored in this chapter. A number of bullet-pointed insights are presented at the chapter’s conclusion to indicate some of the pre-existing tensions, as well as some of the potential future directions, of life story work