Perceptions of Long-term Home Care Users With Dementia: Taiwanese Professional Care Workers’ Views

Conference: The Asian Conference on the Social Sciences (ACSS2022)
Title: Perceptions of Long-term Home Care Users With Dementia: Taiwanese Professional Care Workers’ Views
Stream: Linguistics
Presentation Type: Virtual Presentation
Authors:
Chin-Hui Chen, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Pei-Yu Chen, National Pingtung Univeristy of Science and Technology, Taiwan

Abstract:

With the growing population of older people living with dementia in Taiwan, long-term home care service becomes increasingly needed to assist with those with dementia. Dementia could cause cognitive-related disorders as well as the decline in expressional abilities. Dementia care communication hence can be challenging. This paper attempts to explore how Taiwanese long-term home care workers perceive of older people living with dementia in relation to the communication with them. Existing literature on perceptions toward them tend to focus on medical and institutional contexts, not long-term home care ones. This gap is to be filled by this present study. Based on the in-depth interviews with 35 Taiwanese long-term home care workers, eliciting their view on the research topic, a questionnaire listing the reported perceptions of older people living with dementia was later employed in a survey involving 402 participants sharing how well they agreed with the listed statements. The survey results indicated that the survey subjects with dementia care experiences, as opposed to those without such experiences, more likely see dementia care users still bearing with their own mind and endorse the need to maintain the face. They also agreed with the greater challenges of dementia care communication due to their better understanding of the dementia-related symptoms. The implication of the study is to show that professional care workers could perceive of older people with dementia in line with greater individuality and humanity while they could also perceive them in a stereotypically negative fashion.

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