Routines of “sitting” and “enjoying ourselves” in the common room of a dementia unit

Abstract

Purpose: Routinized activities create security for persons with dementia (PWDs) and help care staff manage everyday tasks, but care staff also assist PWDs with constructing routines during their leisure time. This paper investigates how a PWD negotiates how to use the common room in a dementia ward as a social space with co-present staff members, other residents, and a visiting researcher.

Methods: Based on ethnographic observations and video recordings and using conversation analytical methodology, the paper presents sequential analyses of video recorded data collected at a dementia unit in a Danish care facility.

Results: Detailed analyses of selected instances indicate that the PWD treats care staff as being in charge of the social organization of common room, and they show how the PWD is routinely guided to sit calmly, minding his own business. The analyses also show that the PWD relies on ritualized action and routine activities when managing co-presence and interaction with the visiting researcher.

Moreover, they show that a previous non-routine joint activity is used by the PWD to take initiative and thereby re-establish it later.

Conclusions: We argue that routine and ritual both provide constraints but also resources for PWDs to actively co-co-create new shared activities with co-present others, and we suggest that PWDs’ possibilities for taking initiatives for activities during leisure time among other things rely on the routines that have already been established in interaction with care staff and others or on non-routine activities which PWDs may turn into routines as they re-establish them.

Keywords:

• Dementia
• conversation analysis
• routine
• person-centered care
• joint activity
• incipient talk
• ritualized behavior

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Barbara produces both words, syllables and sounds. Syllables and sounds not recognizable to the authors as words are indicated in the translation as x’s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elisabeth Muth Andersen

Elisabeth Muth Andersen is an assistant professor in Danish language and communication at the Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, and is a member of the research group Social Practices and Cognition. Her PhD explores micro-analytic methodologies to analyze online health communication. Mainly using ethnomethodological conversation analytic methodology, she has conducted research on online health communication practices as well as on interactional practices in interactions involving people with aphasia and people with dementia. Recent publications include papers in Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders and Communication & Medicine - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Healthcare, Ethics and Society. For further information, visit: www.sdu.dk/ansat/elan

Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen

Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen, Ph.D., a postdoc at the Department of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and a member of the Research Centre for Social Practices and Cognition (SoPraCon) at SDU. Using a multimodal ethnomethodological conversation analytic approach, she studies membership and competence as interactional phenomena. She studies interactions involving persons with dementia, including how issues of competence and membership are oriented to in such interactions. Her research also spans topics such as members’ competence in offline and online shopping, academic competence as a member’s concern, linguistic competence in a second language as well as the interactional competence of persons with communicative challenges. Recent publications include papers in Journal of Pragmatics and Research on Language and Social Practices.

Gitte Rasmussen

Gitte Rasmussen is professor of social interaction at the Department of Language and Communication and director of the research centre SoPraCon (Social Practices and Cognition) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Her research primarily focuses on social interactions that involve individuals who have been diagnosed with cognitive or communicative impairments resulting from e.g. neurodevelopmental disorders, acquired brain injuries and neurodegenerative disorders. Her work consists of ethnomethodological conversation analytic descriptions and analyses of the multimodal and embodied practices and methods that co-participants employ to achieve a common understanding for all practical purposes in these kinds of interaction. Since 2006 she lectures at the SDU study program in Speech and Language Therapy. Recent publications include papers in Pragmatics and Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Clinical Linguistics, and Journal of Research in Interaction and Communication Disorders.