Champagne, Eden2025-07-082025-07-082025-07-082025-06-26https://hdl.handle.net/10012/21983As Canada’s population continues to age, more individuals will be living with neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia and caring for loved ones with these conditions. The Government of Canada estimates that in 2022-2023, over 400,000 people were living with diagnosed dementia, and close to 99,000 were newly diagnosed that year (StatsCan, 2025). Most individuals living with dementia are taken care of by a family member (romantic partner/spouse or adult child). However, individuals who step in to take on this role often become burdened and distressed due to the grief associated with the losses their loved one is going through (relational, physical, cognitive) and the compounded strains of caregiving. Once dementia emerges and continues to progress, the negative impact on caregivers’ health and well-being is greater than on other caregiving groups (Kim & Schulz, 2008). Thus, it is imperative to explore how caregiver well-being can be maintained despite the ongoing losses with their loved one. The majority of caregiver support programs which have been developed and evaluated are based on stress-process models, aiming to mitigate impacts of illness-related stress through learning communication skills, coping skills, and information about dementia (Schulz et al., 2020). While some of these programs have shown reductions in caregiver depression, most have minimal effect sizes (Schulz et al., 2020) and focus on reducing dysfunction (e.g., burden), rather than promoting holistic resilience factors (Palacio et al., 2020). Resilience literature suggests that taking a strengths-based approach to caregiver support may offer meaningful pathways to caregiver well-being, by promoting malleable factors such as positive affect, self-efficacy, and ways of coping (Palacio et al., 2020). Despite evidence of how the creative-arts therapies (CATs) such as dance/movement therapy (DMT) can promote positive aspects of well-being such as mood and coping in other populations, they remain underexplored for caregivers in their own right (Irons et al., 2020). CAT programs which have been explored often include the caregiver as a co-facilitator of the activity, alongside their loved one with dementia, and thus they may experience burden rather than respite (Irons et al., 2020). Importantly, proposed therapeutic mechanisms of DMT inherently correspond to resilience factors for caregivers (Champagne, 2024), providing a rationale for how DMT may help caregivers to focus on their own needs and build resources. However, scant if any research has designed or evaluated the benefits of DMT for caregivers. The purpose of this exploratory research was to design, facilitate, and evaluate the impact of a 6-session, theory-driven DMT program on resilience for dementia caregivers and to understand their experiences of this program. The objectives and activities in the DMT sessions were informed by resilience theories and previous work on DMT for resilience in other populations. A pretest-posttest convergent mixed-methods design was used. Outcome measures included caregiving burden, resilience, and psychological flourishing. Weekly quantitative measures of active creativity and DMT therapeutic factors were also distributed to consider therapeutic mechanisms of the program. Qualitative data was captured through post-session journal entries and semi-structured debrief interviews. Online survey data was collected at two time points from 10 dementia caregivers (before and after the DMT program). Repeated-measures t-tests were used to examine the changes in caregiver burden and well-being from before to after the DMT program. Results indicated that caregiver burden was significantly reduced from baseline to follow-up, as expected. However, increases in benefit finding, resilience, and psychological flourishing were not statistically significant. Pearson correlations of key study variables indicated that higher resilience immediately following DMT caused significantly lower caregiver burden at follow-up and was significantly associated with higher resilience at follow-up. Additionally, experiencing more DMT therapeutic factors was negatively associated with burden at follow-up, and positively associated with resilience and psychological flourishing at follow-up, with a medium effect size, but these correlations did not reach statistical significance. Thematic findings from qualitative interviews and post-session journals revealed that the DMT program offered participants experiences of holistic engagement, liberation, and meaningful connection with others, which led to benefits of enhanced coping. Participants described their caregiving experiences as exhausting and overwhelming. They reported feeling constrained and that it was hard to find time for self-care. Participants contrasted their experiences in DMT with preexisting caregiver programs and emphasized how creative movement elicited benefits such as feeling “lighter” and empowered, gaining an attitude of acceptance, and emotional regulation. These findings suggest that DMT programs should continue to be designed and offered on a continual basis for dementia caregivers, for the unique ways in which movement provided a needed “release” and “liberation” which promoted experiences of emotional expression and improved coping. Participants suggested that future iterations of the program should have more sessions, longer sessions to enable more deep processing and debriefing, and more social time. Together, the quantitative and qualitative findings suggest preliminary evidence of the potential for DMT to foster resilience factors and benefit caregiver well-being and coping. Participants in the present study emphasized their own surprise at how useful the modality of DMT was for their needs and urged for more DMT programs to be accessible to them.endementiacaregivingdance/movement therapyresilienceDoctoral Thesis