Dignity in action: A pilot study of encounters between older people and professionals in healthcare settings

Project Duration

October 2013 - October 2014

Funder

FORTE; Swedish Research Council for Working Life and Social Research

Aims

To explore the tacit, craft skills through which dignity is attended to, enacted, and accomplished in situ within the details of talk and social interaction. 

To this end, we will draw on documentaries from the Swedish Media Database at the National Library to build a corpus of video clips of interactions between older people and staff in a range of healthcare settings.

Objectives

1. How are the dimensions of dignity that are highlighted in Swedish policy guidelines made relevant and expressed in the interactions between the healthcare professionals and older people who figure in the documentary care corpus?
2. How can findings from research on medical interaction refine our understanding of dignity as it is realised in interactions between care givers and care recipients?
3. How can findings from research on interaction in more mundane settings including home-based care and everyday life situations more broadly contribute to our understanding of dignity?
4. For which activities and in which settings are communicative practices especially salient for the expression and enhancement of dignity in healthcare settings?
5. How can we develop a research design for recording interactions in older people's care to study dignity without compromising the dignity of the patients and healthcare professionals who participate in our research?

Methods

Study will primarily draw on the perspectives and methods of conversation analysis with:

1. Literature review of interactional research which has examined data and practices relevant to dignity in healthcare of older people
2. Locating candidate episodes where dignity seems to come into play within the documentary care corpus and applying conversation analytic perspectives and methods to these
3. A series of full day workshops entailing discussion of policy statements about dignity in practice, and of previous research findings, and integrating these with observations and discussions of sequences of care in the documentary care corpus
4. Forming a team, and designing a full programme of research on dignity in healthcare of older people, and associated programme grant application

Stage of Development

Complete

A full programme grant "An interdisciplinary program of research on dignified, person-centered care and its implementation in communication skills training in medicine and nursing" has been submitted to the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research, decision expected in November 2014.