“If She’s Anything Like Me…”: Exploring the Use of Verbally-Prompted Storytelling Techniques in Research With People Living With Dementia

Although approaches exist to address challenges in supporting participation of people living with dementia in research, these approaches are rarely evaluated, a critical step to understand their influence on promoting the engagement of people with dementia as research participants. This study sought to examine the influence of verbally-prompted storytelling techniques for engaging people with dementia in qualitative interviews. Participants (n = 12) completed a series of interviews utilizing both traditional semi-structured interviewing techniques with direct questioning and verbally-prompted storytelling techniques. Responses in both interviews were analyzed and compared using qualitative content analysis to evaluate similarities and differences in the resulting data. Observational data were also collected and analyzed using the Engagement of a Person with Dementia Scale to assess the level of engagement in the two types of interviews. Results from the content analysis suggest that verbally-prompted storytelling techniques supported deeper and broader reflection of the impact of one’s own experiences when compared to traditional semi-structured interviews. Storytelling techniques facilitated richer conversations when participants had difficulty recalling a personal example and enabled conversations about emotional topics. Despite these findings, the observed engagement scores across interview types were similar ( p = 0.19). Qualitative results from this study suggest that verbally-prompted storytelling techniques influence data-elicited from qualitative interviews and thus serve as promising techniques to support deep responses during qualitative interviews for this population. These techniques may also be able to support improved communication for other purposes, such as during care conversations. Continued investigations into the application of these techniques in wider populations of people living with dementia and at different stages of their dementia journey will help to establish the usefulness of these techniques more broadly.