Life Story Book for Older Adults and live-in Migrant Caregivers

NCT03726034 | Unknown DMC

• 1 other identifier: RESC2018013
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 100
• Locations: 0 countries
• Sites: N/A

Brief Summary

The relationship between older adults and live-in migrant caregivers is always challenged by weak emotional connectedness, ineffective communication, power struggling and unmet needs of both, that may lead to poor care quality and negatively influence their well-being. The aim of this study is to explore the feasibility to train live-in migrant caregivers to adopt Life Story Work for promoting the dyadic relationship with the older adults, through communication and negotiation, mutual understanding and expression of needs. This is a two-arm randomized controlled trial. The caregivers of the intervention group will receive training on life story work. Then they will be asked to create a life storybook of the older adult at home individually, with the support from the team. The caregivers in the control group will receive training on communication skills only, and will be asked to conduct social activities at home. Outcomes such as quality of relationship; well-being, depressive symptoms and level of loneliness of the older adults; and job satisfaction of the caregivers will be assessed at baseline, post-intervention and 3 months follow up. Focus group interviews will be conducted with the caregivers of the intervention group for soliciting their comments regarding to the intervention.

Conditions

Home Caregiver-older Adults Relationship

Keywords

Caregiver relationship; Life story book; migrant caregivers; older adults; randomized controlled trial

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (1)

• The change in quality of migrant caregiver-older adults relationship as assessed by 4-item Lawrence quality of the caregiver-care recipient relationship scale

  General closeness, communication, similarity of views about life, and degree of getting along will be captured. Total score of the scale ranges from 4-16. Higher values represent a better quality of relationship. The cronhach's alpha for this scale was 0.85.

  basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)

Secondary Outcomes (4)

• The change in loneliness of the older adults as assessed by the Chinese version of 6-item De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale

  basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)

• The change in depressive symptoms of the older adults as assessed by the Chinese version of 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale

  basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)

• The change in well-being of the dyad as assessed by the 12-item General Health Questionnaire

  basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)

• The change in satisfaction of caregiver as assessed by the 6-item Care Work Satisfaction Scale

  basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)

Other Outcomes (1)

• The change in dependency level of older adult as assessed by the 11-item Modified Barthel Index

  basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)

Study Arms (2)

Life story book training

EXPERIMENTAL

The migrant caregivers will receive training (six weekly 1.5-hour sessions) about life story approach by a part-time trained interventionist with psychology or social work background with at least three years of working experience working with older people and have basic knowledge about the life story work. After training, the migrant caregivers will be asked to produce the life story book individually at home with the older adults

Behavioral: Life Story Book

Communication skills training

ACTIVE COMPARATOR

The migrant caregivers who have randomly assigned into the control group will receive communication skills training (two 1.5-hour sessions) offered by another trained interventionist with psychology or social work background with at least three years of working experience working with older people. They would not receive any additional training on life story work.

Behavioral: Self-selected social activities

Interventions

Life Story Book BEHAVIORAL

The protocol of life story book creation is validated in Hong Kong. The life story book would contain two elements: (1) the development of the older adults over the course of his/her lifetime (i.e. from childhood to old age); and (2) the psychosocial development and ways of life of the older adults (e.g. education, marriage, career, and hobbies). The product of the intervention will be a written story with pictures or other memorabilia that are meaningful to the older adults. There is no limitation on the number of words, pages, and pictures. Four to six 60-minute scheduled sessions will be needed for the older adult and the live-in migrant caregivers to discuss and produce the lifestory book at home.

Life story book training

Self-selected social activities BEHAVIORAL

To control the possible social interaction effects on the dyadic relationship and wellbeing, the caregivers of the control group will conduct self-selected social activities with older adult at home individually for four times weekly.

Communication skills training

Eligibility Criteria

• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Age Groups: Child (0-17), Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• aged 60 or above
• community dwelling
• being cared by participating migrant caregivers

You may not qualify if:

• unwilling to create life story book with the migrant caregivers
• not verbally communicable
• diagnosed with serious psychiatric illnesses or terminal illnesses
• Migrant caregivers:
• have been working for the older adutls for more than 6 months
• at least completed primary education
• be communicable in either English or Cantonese.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Tung Wah College: lead

Related Publications (1)

• Lai CKY, Igarashi A, Yu CTK, Chin KCW. Does life story work improve psychosocial well-being for older adults in the community? A quasi-experimental study. BMC Geriatr. 2018 May 16;18(1):119. doi: 10.1186/s12877-018-0797-0.

  PMID: 29769035 BACKGROUND

Central Study Contacts

Ken HM HO, PhD

CONTACT

+852 34686803; kenho@twc.edu.hk

Daphne SK Cheung, PhD

CONTACT

+852 92172170; daphne.cheung@polyu.edu.hk

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Masking: SINGLE
• Who Masked: OUTCOMES ASSESSOR
• Masking Details: A trained research assistant will be responsible to collect demographic data and assessing the outcomes at T0, T1, T2. The research assistant will be blinded to the grouping of participants.
• Purpose: HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
• PI Title: Assistant Professor

Model Details: Two-arm single-blinded randomized controlled feasibility trial.

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: October 22, 2018
• First Posted: October 31, 2018
• Study Start: June 1, 2019
• Primary Completion: August 1, 2020
• Study Completion: December 1, 2020
• Last Updated: March 20, 2019

Record last verified: 2019-03

Data Sharing

• IPD Sharing: Will not share