What Are Your Goals? Goal-Setting Logics in Danish Parkinson’s Rehabilitation

ABSTRACT

Across rehabilitation fields, rehabilitees and professionals meet to set rehabilitation goals. Portrayed as an ordinary, yet foundational practice in rehabilitation, participants often find goal-setting meetings challenging; ideal and real seem to clash. Based on a long-term fieldwork in Danish Parkinson’s disease rehabilitation, we explore goal-setting and its rationale to gain insight into why goal-setting qualifies as challenging. We find that challenges relate to disease, organizational matters and an imbalance in institutional knowledge, but also that different logics, of choice, interdependence, and accountability, entangle and affect goal-setting. A competitive aspect between goal-setting logics appears pivotal to understand the challenges in goal-setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Denmark
• goal-setting
• logics
• Parkinson’s disease
• rehabilitation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for valuable early draft comments from Christina Vestergaard and Jonathan Tonnesen Schubert. We thank reviewers and editors for comments and inspiring suggestions, with a special thanks to co-editor Dr. James Staples for very constructive reflections and suggestions. Most of all, we thank participants in the study for sharing their experiences and thoughts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use “rehabilitee” as a shorthand term for a person undergoing rehabilitation, a pragmatic choice compared to, for example, the term “service user” (which has no direct reference to rehabilitation), or “patient” (which several informants objected to, as they viewed “PD patient” as an unwanted identity marker).

2. Interdependence is an implicit part of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), a classification system promoted by WHO (2001). To assess functioning and disability of an individual, environmental factors include family and network as factors to consider.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by a full PhD scholarship from Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Denmark (6424).

Notes on contributors

Merete Tonnesen

Merete Tonnesen is a social anthropologist, currently a PhD student at Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research interests include hope, goals, temporality, and imagination in the field of rehabilitation, with particular interest in Parkinson’s disease rehabilitation. ORCHID: 0000-0001-9186-8259

Claus Vinther Nielsen

Claus Vinther Nielsen is a professor, MD, specialist in Clinical Social Medicine and Rehabilitation at DEFACTUM and Gødstrup Hospital, Central Denmark Region and Department of Public Health, Aarhus University. Main focus of interest is research in local and municipal setting which involves front line professionals and citizens. Primary research topics are biopsychosocial rehabilitation and functioning in relation to low back pain, heart disease, cancer, and return to work. ORCHID: 0000-0002-2467-1103.

Rikke Sand Andersen

Rikke Sand Andersen is an anthropologist and professor with special responsibilities at Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University and Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark. For the past 8 years Andersen has been leading an anthropological research group at an interdisciplinary research centre (CaP) at Aarhus University, exploring ongoing changes in cancer control. She is currently initiating a research project on state - family relations, exploring how notions of solitude and relatedness may be understood through the diseased body (ALONE). ORCHID: 0000-0003-2450-5866.