Purpose: To support family caregivers of persons post-stroke adequately from the start and to develop self-management interventions, we aim to gain a better understanding of family caregivers experiences at the time of acute care and therefore achieve a better understanding of how they manage their new situation. Methods and Materials: We chose a qualitative descriptive methodology using individual semi-structured interviews with eleven family caregivers of persons post-stroke. We conducted interviews retrospectively, between 2 and 10 months post-stroke, and analysed transcripts using thematic analysis. Results: The themes (1) being in survival mode, (2) feeling supported by family and friends, (3) feeling left alone by the treatment team and (4) insisting on information emerged from the data. Conclusion: During acute care, many self-management skills are required from family caregivers but are just starting to be developed. This development can first be observed as co-management with the social network and is often combined with shared decision-making. Information-sharing, foundational for developing self-management, is essential for family caregivers and should be supported proactively by health professionals from the beginning. Further, from the start, health professionals should raise awareness about role changes and imbalances of activities among family caregivers to prevent negative influences on their health.
The influence of mutual spousal interrelations in domains such as health and wellbeing has been demonstrated, but little is known about the domain of everyday activities of couples in late life. In the present explorative study, we considered all of the activities participating couples talked about to be their everyday activities. Its aim was to understand, over time, changes in everyday activities as experienced by late-life community-dwelling couples. In a two-year period, 41 individual and joint interviews were conducted with 8 couples, who were purposefully selected from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. Analyses involved the construction of couple narratives and constant comparisons within and across couples. Changing everyday activities in late-life couples was interpreted to be a two-way process of (1) converging, and (2) keeping up, which occurred in three fluid phases. Converging was a slow inward movement with a shift towards diminished everyday activities performed in a smaller world. Keeping up was an outward movement in order to resist the converging process by using everyday activities as a means to keep fit, physically and mentally, and to connect with the wider social world. In the first phase, couples maintained their unique linked activity pattern. In the second phase, spouses resisted converging by keeping up. In the third phase, spouses co-performed everyday activities closely together. The findings support the need to develop couple-oriented interventions that aim to enhance the couples' functioning in the domain of everyday activities.
What do a grandmaster Jedi and a grandfather have in common? The answer will become clear in this story of two sisters who used the Career Writing method to identify career questions, life themes, and tapped into the wisdom of their childhood heroes. Lengelle, R., Haggerty, E. (2022). Career Writing and the Tale of Two Sisters: The Family Project, Heroic Drive, and How No Sibling Has the Same Parents. In: Schreiber, M. (ed) Narrative Ansätze in Beratung und Coaching (pp. 163-172). Springer, Wiesbaden.
