Communication Patterns and Characteristics of Family Caregivers and Persons Living With Dementia: Secondary Analysis of Video Observation.

Only 75 videos from 19 unique caregiver-care recipient dyads were analysed, so the findings are exploratory and unstable. The videos were chosen by caregivers from a parent telehealth study, and caregivers knew they were being recorded, so the interactions may not be natural. The sample was limited to spouse and adult-child caregivers in home care settings, so it may not apply to other caregiver types or care settings. The parent intervention was not communication-focused, and although intervention exposure was not significantly related to communication patterns, it may still have influenced the videos. Participant characteristics were grouped into categories because of the small sample and non-normal data, which loses detail. Some variables linked to communication in prior work, such as relationship quality, were not collected in the parent study. The study is cross-sectional, so associations cannot show cause or effect.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The video data came from the FamTechCare study, funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health, grant R01NR014737.

Do not read these associations as evidence that a communication intervention works or that changing a caregiver characteristic will improve communication. This was a small secondary video analysis, and it cannot show cause or effect.