Abstract
Objectives: Communication enables humans to exercise their rights. Dementia research consistently shows that communication skills decrease as the disease progresses. Nonverbal communication abilities decline more slowly than verbal skills and often become more important as the disease advances. However, resources and deficits in nonverbal and verbal communication behavior differ between persons with dementia and contexts. Knebel et al. proposed the observational assessment tool CODEMamb that we believe to be the first standardized instrument to differentiate between content-related and relationship aspects of nonverbal communication behavior. Until now, evaluations of CODEMamb have been exploratory and used small samples.
Method: We therefore retested the psychometric criteria of CODEMamb in persons with a suspected dementia in an ambulatory setting. Data was drawn from 326 older adults (aged 52 − 91) during routine screening in Germany.
Results: Our findings support the three-factorial structure of CODEMamb. Internal consistency of the overall scale and the three subscales of CODEMamb was high. Correlations with CERAD-NP subscales revealed similarities to CODEMamb, indicating sufficient convergent validity. Finally, CODEMamb was able to differentiate between persons according to the stage of their disease.
Conclusion: CODEMamb is a theoretically based, reliable and valid observational assessment tool and its use in ambulatory settings can help foster individual, person-centered communication by identifying the resources of people with dementia, thereby empowering them in rights-exercising situations.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Phillip Elliot and Christopher Strahlenbach for editing the manuscript. We thank those that made this study possible.
Disclosure statement
The authors report no conflict of interest.