Background: People with dementia spend most of the day without care and contact, and usually without activity. This has been proven by numerous studies. Nevertheless, there has been no scientific examination of the question of how people with dementia experience these periods. However, such knowledge would be highly relevant for healthcare professionals and relatives in order to develop adequate strategies for dealing with care-free time. Based on the fundamental Goffmanian question “What is actually going on here?”, the aim of the study is to reconstruct the care-free and encounter-free time periods of people with dementia. The study is designed as an explorative, sequential methodological pluralistic investigation. The care- and encounter-free periods within the project framework of 36 months will be reconstructed using ethnographic methods and the resulting typology will be examined with the help of a survey. In order to be able to describe different social and care cultures, practices and orders, the periods will be examined across all phases of dementia. This is done a) in institutional care facilities in which only people with dementia live or b) people with and without dementia live together and c) in the home setting.
In order to do justice to the research interest, the cross-disciplinary and cross-national team is made up of researchers with expertise in nursing science, gerontology, sociology, psychology and ethnography. The research provides starting points for the representative study of care-free and encounter-free times, for the development of diagnostic tools and for the critical examination of possibilities for interruption, for example through the development of action-guiding and goal-oriented interventions.
Aim: The aim of the study is to research and describe the care-free and encounter-free time periods of people with dementia. This is done from the perspective of the people with dementia themselves and from the perspective of professional caregivers and volunteers. The study takes place in nursing homes and in home care, with Switzerland and Germany being compared with each other. The aim is to present a descriptive description of the modes of action and to work out how people with dementia understand time in their living environment. A classification of these understandings of time is to be developed.
- Division of Nursing Science with focus on Person-centred Care Research
- Active
The research project, from which both the dissertation "Freud, Lipps and the Problem of Empathy" and a series of publications have emerged, examines a philosophical source of Sigmund Freud's that has not yet been fully elaborated. The concept of empathy, much discussed as a result of new findings in the neuroscientific and cognitive fields (including the discovery of mirror neurons), has led to a revisiting of the theories of Theodor Lipps, who is considered among the most important pioneers of empathy research. This historical study opens up a new reading of Lipps' texts. Five appendices complete the dissertation with new translations of Lipps' texts. Furthermore, the work by DDr. Ivan Rotella systematises the concept of empathy in Lipps and its influence on Sigmund Freud against the background of current research.
- Division of Psychodynamics
- Division of Internal Medicine 2 (University Hospital Krems)
- Finished