JMIR Publications

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's disease and related dementia (ADRD). Research suggests that reminiscence strategies combined with an intergenerational approach may yield significant social and mental health benefits for both young and older adults. Experts also recommended the production of a digital life story book as part of reminiscence. Reminiscence is typically implemented by trained professionals (e.g. social workers, nurses), however, there has been growing interest in using trained volunteers due 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 (DST) platform may help older persons with ADRD to improve their social and emotional well-being.

Methods:

The proposed project will conduct a randomized control trial to assess the effects of the intervention. The older and young adult participants will be randomly assigned into the intervention (reminiscence based) or control groups and then be randomly matched as dyads within each group. Data will be collected at baseline prior to the intervention, mid- intervention, at the end of the intervention, and 3 months after the intervention. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design will be utilized involving first collecting and analyzing the quantitative survey data to identify subsamples of participants who report the greatest and least changes in outcome measures. Next, qualitative interviews will be conducted with these subsamples to capture the details of their perceptions of the intervention and to present a more robust analysis, taking advantage of the strengths of both 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 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data collection started in 2020 and ended in 2022. In sum, 126 dyads were matched in the beginning of the intervention. Ninety dyads finished the mid-test survey, and 69 dyads completed the whole intervention and the posttest survey. While 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 volunteers offers promising benefits for both the younger and older generation. Future research may consider scaling up this pilot into a trackable, replicable model that includes more participants with diverse background (e.g., public vs private college, older adults from other agencies) to test the effectiveness of this intervention for older adults with ADRD.