Investigation of dementia sufferers' experiences
Those with dementia spend most of the day without care, encounter, and usually without activity. Although this has been documented in numerous studies, there has been no scientific discussion of how persons with dementia experience these periods of time.
Such knowledge would be highly relevant for health professionals and family members in developing adequate strategies to deal with these situations. Based on the fundamental Goffmanian question "What is actually going on here?", the aim of the study is to reconstruct the care and encounter-free time periods of patients with dementia from the perspective of the persons themselves, and from the perspective of the formal or informal caregivers in institutional and home-based, long-term care settings in Switzerland and Germany, in order to present a descriptive account of the modes of action, and to develop and test a typification of lifeworld understandings of time.
