Life activity choices by people with aphasia: repeated interviews and proxy agreement

ABSTRACT

Background: Person-centered rehabilitation requires that meaningful life activities are identified on a case-by-case basis, but the discovery process can be inaccessible for clients with aphasia. Card-sorting methodology addresses core barriers and help clients communicate their preferences.

Aims: To characterize life activities that people with aphasia want to do, to estimate consistency in selections over time, and to replicate previous findings about the ability of family members and friends to identify their loved ones’ activity preferences.

Methods & Procedures:  We administered the Life Interests and Values (LIV) Cards to 26 people with aphasia, asking them which of 95 depicted life activities they wanted to do more in their lives. Half the activity cards were presented again one to ten weeks later. Twenty family members or friends responded as proxies by selecting from a questionnaire with the same items.

Outcomes & Results: Participants with aphasia selected diverse activities, though as a group they identified significantly more activities from the “social” activity category than from the “home and community”, “creative and relaxing”, or “physical” categories. Across the repeated interviews, they selected identical activities on average 78% of the time. Item-to-item agreement between people with aphasia and their proxy responders was significantly lower at 69%.

Conclusions: People with aphasia have diverse activity interests and are reliable informants about their preferences. Because significant others have limited ability to predict these choices, their impressions are inadequate substitutes for direct interviews.

KEYWORDS:

• Goal setting
• life participation
• person-centered care
• counseling

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by award number UL1TR001111 from the National Institutes of Health. The results were presented, in part, at the 2018 Clinical Aphasiology Conference in Austin, TX. The LIV Cards are sold by the University of North Carolina Department of Allied Health Sciences. We thank Samantha Ecker and Katherine Mortensen for all their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [UL1TR001111].