Effects of dementia knowledge and dementia fear on comfort with people having dementia: Implications for dementia-friendly communities

Abstract

Background and objectives Advocates for dementia-friendly communities emphasize the need for the public to know about the dementias and to experience social comfort with people having dementia. This research tested a conceptual model of influences on social comfort, including two types of dementia knowledge and personal dementia fear. Research design and methods Data were collected from 645 Wisconsin residents through an online platform (Qualtrics®) and community outreach efforts. A hierarchical multiple regression was conducted and its results were mapped onto a figure representing the conceptual model of social comfort. Results Greater personhood-based knowledge (based on observations of the capabilities and perspectives of persons with dementia) and less personal dementia fear significantly predicted higher levels of social comfort, while biomedical knowledge did not. Although more personhood-based knowledge improved overall comfort regardless of the level of biomedical knowledge, people with higher levels of biomedical knowledge benefitted the most from having personhood-based knowledge. Discussion and implications These findings suggest that activities that promote personhood-based knowledge may enhance social comfort. These activities may be most effective for individuals who already have a high level of biomedical knowledge about people with dementia. Community members and professionals ought to strike a balance between biomedical knowledge and personhood-based knowledge, as the two together may be associated with higher levels of social comfort. This could benefit the promotion of dementia-friendly community initiatives.

Dementia Literacy in the Greater Bay Area, China: Identifying the At-Risk Population and the Preferred Types of Mass Media for Receiving Dementia Information

“…In addition, individuals with inadequate dementia literacy might feel a tremendous amount of discomfort when persons with dementia are around them, or would not feel obliged to support these people and their caregivers [4]. Social discomfort with people with dementia has been found to be prevalent, but this phenomenon could be reversed by increasing knowledge about dementia by educating the public [5]. To date, most studies in dementia literacy were from high-income countries, such as the study conducted in Australia by Low and team [3,6] and that conducted by Woo [7] in the USA.…”

Dementia Literacy in Greater Bay Area, China: Identifying the At-risk Population and the Preferred Mass Media for Receiving Dementia Information

“…In addition, individuals with inadequate dementia literacy would feel tremendous discomfort when the persons with dementia are around them, or would not feel obliged to support the patients and their caregivers [4]. Social comfort to dementia was found to be prevalent but this phenomenon could be reverted through education by increasing knowledge of dementia [5]. By now, most of the studies in dementia literacy were from high-income countries such as Low and team's study [3,6] in Australia and Woo's study [7] in USA.…”

Creating Dementia-Friendly Communities for Social Inclusion: A Scoping Review

“…-Barriers in implementation included: Taboo on dementia, rapid turnover of personnel, top-down decision. of educational materials, involvement on an organizational level, and promotion/advertisement of DFCs (Buckner et al, 2019;Dean et al, 2015b;Ebert et al, 2020;Heward et al, 2017;Phillipson et al, 2019). Personhood-based knowledge was specifically highlighted as beneficial in results when educating the public about dementia (Ebert et al, 2020;Phillipson et al, 2019).…”