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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Perceptions of change over time in early-stage Alzheimer's disease
— implications for understanding awareness and coping style | | Author(s) | Linda Clare, Ilona Roth, Rebekah Pratt |
| Journal title | Dementia: the international journal of social research and practice, vol 4, no 4, November 2005 |
| Pages | pp 487-520 |
| Source | http://www.dem.sagepub.com |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Early ; Adjustment ; Longitudinal surveys. |
| Annotation | Emerging models of subjective experience, awareness and coping in early-stage dementia may usefully be enhanced by incorporating a temporal perspective. The authors report a prospective 1-year follow-up of 17 participants with early-stage Alzheimer's disease (AD) whose accounts had contributed to the development of Clare's phenomenological model of awareness incorporating the continuum model of coping in early-stage dementia. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to identify emergent themes. All participants continued to demonstrate some awareness of difficulties with memory, but individuals varied in their evaluations of the extent and implications of these changes, with the majority tending towards more normalising explanations. Many were nevertheless making practical adjustments to their activities, and the need to renegotiate relationships was a prominent issue. Subsequently, the data were examined for themes identified in the original study, the initial model was re-applied, and changes to individual coping style over time were explored through case study analysis. The range of processes and coping styles observed across participants 12 months earlier was still apparent, with some indication of increased polarisation between self-maintaining and self-adjusting styles of coping. A small number of participants showed significant changes in coping style, which changes occurring in both directions. The findings suggest that expression of awareness interacts with coping style, illustrating the need to consider both factors in combination in order to better understand individual expressions of awareness of change. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-051219213 A |
| Classmark | EA: 4J: DR: 3J |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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