Study title

This collection contains semi-structured qualitative interviews with a sample of 20 of the study’s participants with dementia, along with their main carer. Improving the Experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life (IDEAL) is a longitudinal cohort study. It focused on the potential for living well with dementia from the perspective of people with dementia and their primary carers. By living well, we mean maximising life satisfaction, reaching one's potential for well-being, and experiencing the best possible quality of life in the context of the challenges that dementia presents for individuals, relationships and communities. Drawing together expertise from psychology, sociology, medicine, public health, economics, social policy, physiology and statistics, the study examined what can be done to ensure that as many people as possible are enabled to live well with dementia. Living well with dementia, whether as a person with dementia (PwD) or primary (usually family) carer (PC), can be understood as maximising life satisfaction, reaching one's potential for well-being, and experiencing the best possible quality of life (QoL). Enabling PwD and PC to live well with dementia is a key UK policy objective, but policy recommendations do not tell us how this can be achieved. This project aims to understand what 'living well' means from the perspective of PwD and PC. It will identify what helps people to live well or makes it difficult to live well in the context of having dementia or caring for a person with dementia. In order to understand what 'living well' means to people with dementia and primary carers, and what influences the possibility of living well, we will find out about the things that affect the way in which people adapt to the effects of the condition and the challenges it presents, and how these things change over time. These include the assets and resources people have available, and the support they get from other people in their network. We will...