Analyzing Nursing Assistant Attitudes Towards Empathic Geriatric Caregiving Using Quantitative Ethnography

TL;DR

This study uses quantitative ethnography to analyze nursing assistants' attitudes towards empathic geriatric care, revealing significant differences between real-life and training activities and suggesting improvements for training programs.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of quantitative ethnography to analyze caregiver attitudes, bridging qualitative insights with quantitative rigor in geriatric care research.

Findings

Significant difference between real-life and training activities (Cohen's d=1.63)

Informed the need for more empathetic training scenarios

Illustrated QE's utility in analyzing expert interviews for design insights

Abstract

An emergent challenge in geriatric care is improving the quality of care, which requires insight from stakeholders. Qualitative methods offer detailed insights, but they can be biased and have limited generalizability, while quantitative methods may miss nuances. Network-based approaches, such as quantitative ethnography (QE), can bridge this methodological gap. By leveraging the strengths of both methods, QE provides profound insights into need-finding interviews. In this paper, to better understand geriatric care attitudes, we interviewed ten nursing assistants, used QE to analyze the data, and compared their daily activities in real life with training experiences. A two-sample t-test with a large effect size (Cohen's d=1.63) indicated a significant difference between real-life and training activities. The findings suggested incorporating more empathetic training scenarios into the future design of our geriatric care simulation. The results have implications for human-computer interaction and human factors. This is illustrated by presenting an example of using QE to analyze expert interviews with nursing assistants as caregivers to inform subsequent design processes.