Parallel Realities: The Interactional Management of Confabulation in Dementia Care Encounters

Abstract

Persons with dementia sometimes confabulate (that is, utter statements unaware of their falsity). This threatens the shared world that is normally presumed as the basis for communication. Coparticipants then have to choose between acquiescing in the confabulation, being noncommittal, or indeed correcting the speaker. In this conversation analytical case study of one individual with vascular dementia, I investigate how health-care personnel and volunteers deal with the problem. The data were extracted from a 30-hour video corpus of interactions between one confabulating person and, in total, eight other elderly individuals, three professional caregivers, and a volunteer at a Swedish-speaking day care center for the elderly in Finland. We see how care providers react to confabulations with a range of response practices along the continuum of acquiescence and noncommitment (but not into the more challenging area of correction). Data are in Finland-Swedish with English translation.

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