This is Me: Evaluation of a boardgame to promote social engagement, wellbeing and agency in people with dementia through mindful life-storytelling.

Receiving a dementia diagnosis is a difficult experience for most people and often affects their wellbeing negatively. To support people's wellbeing, in a therapeutic context, life-storytelling, reminiscence and mindfulness are used with people with dementia. In an everyday context, traditional games are used as a resource for stimulating memory, cognition and social activity. While an increasing number of creative strategies are available to support people with dementia, the area of board games design and their effect on wellbeing is underexplored. This paper reports on the evaluation of the This is Me (TIM) mindful life-storytelling board game by the European project MinD. Using a co-design methodology, TIM was developed with and for people with mild to moderate dementia to support their wellbeing by enhancing self-empowerment and social engagement. A focus group methodology was used to evaluate TIM with 50 people with dementia and 19 carers across four countries. TIM was evaluated with regard to the usability and experience of the design as well as people's emotional wellbeing, social engagement and agency. The thematic analysis demonstrated that the combination of life-storytelling and mindfulness allowed players to engage in meaningful social interaction and, as a result, they reported enjoyment, learning, more acceptance of the past and present situation, and that they perceived looking forward into the future together with others as helpful. The study demonstrates that design can be a useful means to support people with dementia in aspects of emotional wellbeing, social engagement and a sense of agency.

Assessing the generalisability of a multicentre qualitative dementia research: the experience and challenges faced by the MinD project in Europe.

Background: Generalisation of findings is an important aspect of research and essential for evidence-based practice. While generalisation is common in quantitative research, there is a lack of generalisability in qualitative research. This paper presents the experience and challenges faced by the Designing for People with Dementia (MinD) project in meeting the requirements to strengthen the generalisation of findings on the lived experience of people living with dementia and their engagement to co-create designs to empower their everyday living.   Methods: Polit and Beck (2010)'s strategies to generalise qualitative findings were applied: (1) replication in sampling; (2) replication of studies; (3) meta-synthesis of findings; (4) reflexivity and conceptualization; (5) immersion with the data; and (6) thick description. Results: While it is possible to increase the generabilisabilty of qualitative evidence through the replication of the sampling to attain a large, heterogeneous sample in different and multiple contexts and environments; implementation of sound and robust research; conducting in-depth analysis and interpretation collaboratively for emergent themes; and meeting the thick description requirement, there are challenges that the project team faced in implementing some of the Polit and Beck's strategies because of the condition, namely dementia, that our participants are having. Other challenges faced were: the language and cultural diversity in the team; diverse  work and organisational procedures; and the inter-disciplinary differences relating to the methods of enquiry, approaches and techniques to conduct research. These challenges will need to be identified and addressed at the start of the project with a strong leadership to ensure a seamless journey to complete the project successfully. Trust between the researchers and participants, and time to build this trust are critical to recruitment and participation in the study; these factors are of utmost important in research involving participants with condition such as dementia.