Evaluation and Analysis of Quality of Life Picture Test Materials
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Date
2009-06
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
Persons with dementia experience communication difficulties amongst their many symptoms that pose challenges to their daily lives. A great concern surrounding persons with dementia is their quality of life (QoL) (Bourgeois, 2008). Recent research has focused on developing more ways to facilitate accurate expression of their opinions, and subsequently construct methods to improve the quality of life of persons with dementia. This study evaluated materials for a QoL measurement test to be used with persons with dementia. The main purpose of this project was to determine to what extent photographic pictures versus line drawings improved the ability of persons with dementia to respond reliably to questions about their QoL. Ten nursing home residents with moderate to severe dementia were shown a set of visual stimuli comprised of six photographs and six line drawings of emotions and asked to identify and discuss the emotions pictured. The results suggested that subjects were better able to identify emotions in photographs than in line drawings, but there was no significant difference between photographs and line drawings in the number of words used to describe emotions or the number of relevant responses subjects gave when they were told what the target emotion is. Subjects used more words to describe incorrectly identified emotions than correctly identified emotions, suggesting that when they could retrieve the emotion label they were able to describe the emotion easily. In contrast, when they could not retrieve the emotion label, they used more words to try to retrieve information from memory.
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Keywords
dementia, picture test, photographs, line drawings