Intergenerational Reminiscence and Digital Storytelling

Summary

The goal of this clinical trial is to develop and test how reminiscence offered by trained young adult volunteers using a digital storytelling (DST) platform may help older persons with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) to improve their social and emotional well-being. The main questions it aims to answer are:

1. Whether is this reminiscence and DST based intervention effective in improving social and emotional well-being of older adults with ADRD?
2. Whether do young adult participants improve their social and emotional well-being as well as knowledge and attitudes towards aging after participating this study?

Older adult participants in the intervention group will receive 6 sessions of life-review with young adult volunteers and create a DST based on their life review discussion in the last 4 weeks. Older adult participants in the social wellness control group will receive 6 sessions of general talks with young adults and create a non-digital scrapbook or journal at week 7-10. Researchers will compare these two groups to see if participants in the intervention group benefit more on their well-being.

Conditions

• Alzheimer Disease

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Reminiscence with digital storytelling

The older and young adult participants will be randomly assigned into the intervention (reminiscence) or control (social wellness) groups and then be randomly matched as dyads within each group. Older adults in the intervention group will receive 10 sessions of life-review with the trained young adult volunteers (1-1.5 hours each week for 10 weeks). During weeks 1-6, a life history interview will be carried out with different themes in each week: major turning points in life (W1), family history (W2), life/career accomplishments (W3), history of loves and hates (W4), stress experiences (W5), and meaning and purpose of life (W6). During weeks 7-10, the dyads will develop the DST together using tablets already owned by the UTA School of Social Work. The contents of sessions 7-10 will be structured as: outline/script, plan and storyboard (W7), film and record (W8), evaluate, integrate and finalize (W9), and publish/share (W10).

BEHAVIORAL

Social wellness with scrapbook or journal

Older adults in the control group will have general social wellness discussion with the young adult volunteers, instead of structured reminiscence guidelines. The topics are: diet and health (week 1); exercise/activity and health (week 2); emotions and health (week 3); religious/spiritual practices and health (week 4); family/friend relationships and health (week 5); and social activities/engagement and health (week 6). For weeks 7-10, instead of DST, the young adult volunteer will work with the older adult to create an unstructured, non-digital record of the social visit related to wellness in later life (e.g. wellness scrapbook/journal).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Retirement Research Foundation

  collaborator OTHER

• The University of Texas at Arlington

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

65 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-04-15

Primary Completion

2022-08-11

Completion

2022-08-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations