Assessment of Caregiving Constructs: Toward a Personal, Familial, Group, and Cultural Construction of Dementia Care through the Eyes of Personal Construct Psychology

Abstract

Conditions that cause cognitive impairment and behavioural and personality changes, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementia, have global impact across cultures. However, the experience of dementia care can vary between individuals, families, formal caregivers, and social groups from various cultures. Self-reported measures, caregiving stress models, and conceptual theories have been developed to address the physical, financial, psychological, and social factors associated with the experience of dementia care. Given the cross-cultural variability in the experience of dementia care, it is important for such methodologies to take individual and cultural construct systems into account. We contend that personal and group constructs associated with dementia care should be explored in both the formal and informal caregiving contexts. Therefore, in this paper we introduce the theory of Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) with its explicit philosophy, well-elaborated theory, and derived assessment methods as a potential constructivist research approach to examine the personal, familial, group, and cultural construct systems that determine the experience of dementia caregiving. These concepts and assessment procedures are illustrated in this paper through case study examples and scenarios from the context of dementia care with a focus on family home caregivers. This paper elaborates the assessment and therapeutic approaches of personal construct theory (PCT) to further expand alternatives for support services and program interventions and to amplify policies for dementia care within and across cultures.

Team, Career, and Management: Mental Maps of Working Conditions and Intention to Stay of Physicians in Academic Medicine

“…The gathered data not only on factors required for success, but the relative importance of each factor to the concept of successful practice (White, 1996). It is a methodology commonly employed in Job Analysis i.e., describing jobs and the attributes required to perform them, and provides the workers' perspective (Hill et al, 2016;Hamad et al, 2017;Burke, 2022). The Repertory Grids were analyzed, visualized as 'mental maps' of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction aspects, and they were related to NPS expressing satisfaction with working conditions, training and intention to stay.…”

Home care in dementia: The views of informal carers from a co-designed consultation

“…Food and music, for example can be essential for maintaining cultural identity for individuals with dementia (Anthony, 2015; Osman et al, 2016), which was reflected in the present study. Furthermore, experiences of dementia care can vary between different families, social groups and cultures and so efforts should be made to accommodate diversity in dementia homecare provision (Hamad et al, 2017).…”

Reconstruction of a Caregiver Burden Scale: Identifying Culturally Sensitive Items in Saudi Arabia

“…Moreover, such constructs (“as oldest adult child I am the one who is responsible for taking care of my parent” or “what goes around comes around”) may prevent caregivers from seeking help either inside (family support) or outside (formal support) the family, even in a society with the appropriate services available. Support services are needed to help caregivers “reconstruct” and adjust to the new experience of long-term caregiving (Hamad et al, 2017). More advanced psychological (cognitive) approaches are also recommended for the same purpose (Cheng, Lau, Mak, Ng, & Lam, 2014).…”

“…In the present study, we used personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955) as a theoretical foundation to explore the construction of the family caregiving experience in the target culture (Hamad et al, 2017). This exploration included the examination of personal constructs (participants’ words, phrases, or expressions) and individual construct systems (individuality) and group (or familial) construct systems (commonality) related to caregiving.…”