TDNet Discover

The purpose of the quantitative study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational intervention by comparing the improvement in knowledge and attitudes of older adult and caregiver participants in South Carolina. Orangeburg County, a rural area in South Carolina, ranks 8th in the nation for Alzheimer's disease prevalence, according to research estimates. As the older adult population, ages 65 and older, continues to grow, there has been an increase in the cases of dementia and elder financial abuse. Research suggests that caregivers often do not have the training to identify, prevent, and mitigate elder abuse, as well as detect signs of dementia and prompt early diagnosis. Two hundred and fifty-one workshop participants, of which 69 were caregivers, and 182 were older adults, participated in an educational intervention titled “Elder Financial Abuse in the Dementia Community,” which focused on the topics of dementia and elder financial abuse. The quantitative study compared the independent variable, the educational intervention (training workshop), to the dependent variables of knowledge before and after the educational intervention and attitudes toward the educational intervention using paired sample ttesting and descriptive statistics analysis. The results showed that the average score received by all participants improved from 78.6 in the pre-test to 86.7 in the post-test, with 79% of respondents evaluating the workshop as excellent. The educational intervention was evaluated as effective in all four levels of Kirkpatrick’s theoretical framework: reaction, learning, behavior, and results.