AI for Qualitative Research in Dementia Care

The PLOS ONE study protocol PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026) describes a mixed-methods programme that will generate longitudinal interviews, ethnographic notes, and a co-produced qualitative synthesis to identify inclusive strategies for social care support.

• According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), the study will interview 40 African and African-Caribbean people living with dementia (n = 10 per site) in three sequential interviews each, producing 120 in-depth interview recordings.
• According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), ethnographic fieldwork will run in four Local Authority sites for 30 days per site, totalling 120 observation days across 12 Adult Social Care teams.
• According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), the research will produce co‑produced, actionable recommendations to "identify inclusive strategies to facilitate social care support", with materials published in multiple languages.
• According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), the protocol notes that only nine UK studies in the prior 20 years focused on African and African-Caribbean people living with dementia, and AAC dementia prevalence in minoritised groups is projected to increase seven-fold by 2051.

The PLOS ONE study protocol (published July 27, 2026) answers who, what, when and how: it is a three-year (2025–2027) NIHR-funded project combining an evidence synthesis, longitudinal narrative interviews, ethnography, and creative workshops to examine support-seeking and service responses for African and African-Caribbean people living with dementia.

According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), the evidence synthesis uses the Joanna Briggs meta-aggregation approach to generate recommendations for practice, the narrative interviews comprise 40 participants with three interviews each (120 sessions) conducted over a four-month window per site, and ethnography includes 30 observation days per Local Authority (n = 4 sites).

According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), recruitment will use purposive and snowball sampling, include participants aged 50 and older to capture young-onset cases, and apply an intersectionality framework to surface how race, gender, class, migration history and other axes shape access to services.

Researchers and social care teams should plan for multi-modal, long-form qualitative data because PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026) specifies 120 interview sessions and 120 observation days that generate transcripts, field notes, and documentary artifacts.

According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), using an intersectional analytic frame is essential because the protocol explicitly links race, migration history, class, gender and disability to differential recognition, late presentation and crisis outcomes for African and African-Caribbean people living with dementia.

According to PLOS ONE (published July 27, 2026), practice-focused outputs must be co-produced and multilingual; the protocol promises training materials, factsheets and media in languages including French, Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Swahili and Somali to reach diverse communities.

The PLOS ONE study protocol (Mwale et al., published July 27, 2026) sets out a comprehensive, intersectional, multi-method approach that will generate 120 interview sessions and 120 ethnographic observation days to inform inclusive social care strategies.

Researchers and Adult Social Care teams that plan to evaluate or replicate this approach should prepare for large volumes of longitudinal qualitative data and for co-production with community advisory groups, as described in PLOS ONE (July 27, 2026).

Evidano can accelerate the end-to-end workflow from transcription to thematic and cross-segment analysis and help turn the protocol’s findings into accessible, multilingual outputs; to explore how Evidano maps to these needs, visit Evidano Features or test the platform directly.

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Quote: "Identifying inclusive strategies to facilitate social care support"; Mwale et al., PLOS ONE (2026).

Quote: "We don’t do dementia"; Berwald et al., as cited in Mwale et al., PLOS ONE (2016 reference).