Maud Hevink

| 125 5 Informal caregiver: ‘Ok, no’ Participant: ‘No way. Not really no. I would like to but uh, I can’t imagine being like that, that we’re laughing like that.’ The Netherlands, Informal caregiver and Participant 4 Strategies for developing and improving the photo elicitation techniques Previous research with people with dementia has identified two types of visual data collection techniques as useful for promoting engagement in research by people with dementia: those which use researcher-driven and selected photographs, films, or visual tools and those in which participants produce or select their own visual artifacts (13). In this study, we utilised researcher selected stock photos and a researcher generated hypothetical scenario involving two characters: Thelma (who was recently diagnosed with dementia) and her husband (John). On reflection, a shortcoming may have been that the hypothetical nature of the images and scenarios made them less believable and limited research engagement by some participants. Firstly, the hypothetical scenarios were strongly culturally bound (i.e., our characters had western names, were heterosexual and white and their formal well-dressed appearance in the stock images also suggested they possessed relative wealth). The scenario also concluded with representations of happiness for Thelma and John at 12 months post-diagnosis – which whilst consistent with recommendations for a positive ending in dementia research (18)– provoked both strong positive and negative reactions from some participants. To build on these insights we suggest future research take advantage of the known benefits of co-designing research activities with people with dementia (50). Use of co-design is one way to enhance knowledge exchange between researchers and people with dementia through the incorporation of their ideas and experiences. We recommend that co-designing projective and enabling methods with a diverse group of people with dementia may be helpful to support the selection and design of more varied scenarios, images, and cases. This will be important to improve the approach and stimulate more discussion of cultural and experiential differences. Engaging in co-design with a varied group of people with dementia may also assist with decreasing the reliance on a single scenario and providing opportunities for testing whether different cultural groups engage more with different types of projective techniques (an

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