Reflection:
I joined a research team that broke a very broad question of ‘how can we build more meaningful connections with individuals with dementia’ into a couple of smaller groups that would research the effects of single potential relationship modalities. The group I was involved with specifically studied the effects of using memory books to build meaningful engagement in communication, emotion, and expression. These memory books consisted of images of generic items from the individual's early lives with a brief description and basic background. We studied the effects on behavioral elements of the conversation with a five-point rating scale ranging from often to all the time. Upon completion of our data analysis, we concluded that the implementation of memory books benefitted meaningful engagements and boosted the conversational abilities of individuals with dementia. Dissemination of this project occurred at the Health and Biomedical Sciences Summit and the Undergraduate Research Symposium as well as MNSHA.
This project was broken down into smaller steps that started with identifying a few research questions and then developing a way to test them. After spending several weeks reading related literature members of the team began data collection. I personally was not one of the students who participated in the data collection, however, I did take part in entering all the data into a single file. This helped me feel equally immersed in the data collection process. At this point, the data from our research has not been analyzed yet but showed promising signs of positive results. Before completing our analysis, we composed an abstract to submit as our proposal to the director of all three conventions. This process was a little tedious as we all have to register for the appropriate events and ensure our project met each of the requirements. After our proposals were accepted, we finished conducting our data analysis, formulated some graphs, and began discussing information for our conclusion. Our first dissemination was at the Health and Biomedical Sciences Summit at the end of March. This event went smoothly and was great practice for our later presentations. We were required to submit a recording of our poster presentation for the MNSHA convention which we completed just a few weeks after the summit. The final dissemination of this project occurred at the end of April. My experience of dissemination was much like I expected it to be; I especially enjoyed presenting to engaged listeners who asked a lot of questions making the presentation more of an educational conversation. The completion of this research project and appropriate group dissemination fulfills the competency requirements for Original Research Levels one, two, three, and four as well as Dissemination of Results Levels one, two, and three.
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