'I don't like your face!': Narratives about dementia agitation as a site for caregiver socialization

People in our society are living longer, dementia is becoming more common, and there is still no cure. Family members are increasingly looking to small homes in which to place their loved ones, the staff of which must make sense of the disease together in order to care for their residents. Working from an ethnomethodological perspective that organizations are constituted through such interactions, this study draws on multi-modal conversation analytic methods to explore video data of meetings attended by a group of long-term caregivers. An analysis is presented, which considers the structure, content, and interactional co-construction of a set of recurring narratives about dementia-related agitation, as well as the frequent embedding of enactments of resident and caregiver behavior within those narratives. The notions of tacit knowledge sharing and socialization in the workplace are explored, with a particular look at how the narrative structure of the agitation stories intersects with the caregivers’ construction of an interpretive framework for dementia behavior to shape the socialization that occurs in this setting. Ultimately, this study aims to prompt a broader line of inquiry into how caregivers co-create interpretive frameworks for dementia, and how that framework informs how they interact with residents suffering from a disease no one yet fully understands.