Background and Objectives: Dance is increasingly being implemented in residential long-term care to improve health and function. However, little research has explored the potential of dance to enhance social inclusion by supporting embodied self-expression, creativity, and social engagement of persons living with dementia and their families.Research Design and Methods: This was a qualitative sequential multiphase study of Sharing Dance Seniors, a dance program that includes a suite of remotely streamed dance sessions that are delivered weekly to participants in long-term care and community settings. Our analysis focused on the participation of 67 persons living with dementia and 15 family carers in residential long-term care homes in Manitoba, Canada. Data included participant observation, video recordings, focus groups, and interviews; all data were analyzed thematically.Results: We identified 2 themes: playfulness and sociability. Playfulness refers to the ways that the participants let go of what is “real” and became immersed in the narrative of a particular dance, often adding their own style. Sociability captures the ways in which the narrative approach of the Sharing Dance Seniors program encourages connectivity/intersubjectivity between participants and their community; participants co-constructed and collaboratively animated the narrative of the dances.Discussion and Implications: Our findings highlight the playful and imaginative nature of how persons living with dementia engage with dance and demonstrate how this has the potential to challenge the stigma associated with dementia and support social inclusion. This underscores the urgent need to make dance programs such as Sharing Dance Seniors more widely accessible to persons living with dementia everywhere.

Older adults have been described as a vulnerable group in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Canada, where this study took place, older adults have been encouraged to self-isolate while the rest of the population has been cautioned against in-person contact with them. Prior to COVID-19, social isolation and loneliness among older adults was considered a serious public health concern. Using a series of semi-structured interviews with 26 community-dwelling older adults (65+) living in rural Manitoba, we explore older adults’ experiences of isolation and loneliness in the initial stages of the pandemic between the months of May and July 2020. Participants identified a loss of autonomy, loss of activities and social spaces (e.g., having coffee or eating out, volunteering, and going to church), and lack of meaningful connection at home as factors influencing their sense of isolation and loneliness. Although these loses initially influenced participants’ self-reported isolation and loneliness, the majority developed strategies to mitigate isolation and loneliness, such as drawing on past experiences of isolation, engaging in physically distanced visits, connecting remotely, and “keeping busy.” Our findings call attention to the role of different environments and resources in supporting older adults social and emotional wellbeing, particularly as they adapt to changes in social contact over time.

Health and social science researchers are increasingly interested in the range of new possibilities and benefits associated with diary methods, particularly using digital devices. In this article, we explore how a flexible diary method, which enables participants to choose the device (i.e., paper notebook, tablet, or computer) and medium (i.e., text, photographs, sketches) through which they narrate their experiences, can be used to promote sensitive and rigorous research engagement with family carers to people with dementia. We used a diary interview method with 10 carers over the course of 6 weeks to explore how they experience and interpret the changing behaviors of their cognitively impaired kin. We reflect on how the quality of diary data can be enhanced alongside the ethical dimensions of research with carer populations, through different forms of diary keeping, regular interaction with participants, reflexive practice, and follow-up interviews.