Week 2 Overview:

For Week 2, I had the opportunity to begin laying out my research project goals, literature, and current findings within the project. My partner, Flannery, and I began analyzing the five articles provided by our graduate mentor, Aehong. My partner and I were instructed to not fully understand the articles detail by detail since the articles are not focused on the research we are conducting, but rather analyze the structure of the research article similar to our project and how we can write our research papers.

One such article that I had extreme interest in is in: Yunan Chen’s Caring for Caregivers: Designing for Integrality . In this article, I learned the different states assigned to caregivers by the researcher which include the Physical Self, Emotional Self, Social Self, and Reflective Self. These headings describe the different states the caregiver may be experiencing.

On Wednesday, May 30th, my research team and I went to Meadow Wood Assisted Living to interview our first caregiver for our data collection. I was extremely excited to go out on the field and begin my data analysis and contribute to a breaking research Aehong has been describing to me.

Flannery and I with the administrator of the Assisted Living Community

The interview was with caregiver, given as a Psuedonym “Ms. S” , who is currently living in Bloomington, Indiana to live closer to her son who is a staff member at Indiana University. Ms. S is originally from Vermont and has lived around the state of New York before finding her retirement home in Indiana. For confidentiality reasons, I cannot disclose the responses Ms. S provided. However, I can say Ms. S was very cooperative and gave me an insight into different pathways my research can go. For example, my research team many tailor to a new issue within caregivers and their families that the team can focus on depending on the way the participants reply.

After the interview, the research team and I were offered a full tour of the Meadow Wood facility, in which I was able to see the different lifestyles the elderly live. I was given an insight into the daily life of an elder person. I feel this is essential for my research because it gives me a broader background on the material I should be studying and researching.

My ultimate deliverable’s are to:

• Analyze
• Develop a prototype that addresses the issues between caregivers and their respective individual care
• Improve the overall communication method of caregivers in which the family and caregiver have a better understanding of their family member’s well-being and prompt responses on any issues.

There is currently no set timeline since this project is still adapting itself to a structured work-environment, however, my research team is setting up interviews with respite providers and caregivers around the Bloomington area in order to collect data for our project. Currently, there is three other participants who are to be scheduled for an interview; likely this Saturday.