Navigating Through the Narrative Montages: Including Voices of Older Adults With Dementia Through Collaborative Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

Having the opportunity to express oneself is an important right to every human being. However, narratives of older adults with moderate to severe dementia are constantly ignored for their incoherence and inaccuracy. In most studies, their narratives were solely collected to measure their cognitive function, rendering their lived stories untold, unheard and undocumented. To include voices of older adults with moderate to severe dementia in research and liberate them from the patient identity, this article proposes collaborative narrative inquiry as a method to explore the meaning-making mechanisms and selfhood construction processes embedded in their incoherent narratives. Integrating narrative inquiry and collaborative analysis, collaborative narrative inquiry aims to collect, construct and deconstruct narratives of participants through an iterative and reflective way, in collaboration with caregivers. This method requires a paradigm shift from generating one essential truth of people’s lived experience to co-creating plural lived truths situated in different temporal, social and cultural backgrounds. Facilitating the proliferation of identities beyond the patient identity among older adults with moderate to severe dementia, collaborative narrative inquiry generates counter narratives against a single disease narrative. It de-marginalizes this group by inviting their voices back into the society, and destigmatises them by creating a new way to engage with them.