Panel: Experiencing Parkinson’s dance: qualitative, quantitative and participatory research insights about health profiles, aesthetics, and relational research ethics

In health care policy in many countries, there is increasing support for holistic, person- or patient-centered, participatory approaches to treatment, research and the communication of research. This support refers to research pointing at the value of patients’ experiential knowledge and the importance of the participation of patients in the collaborative production and communication of knowledge. This panel has a dual focus on person-centred treatment and person-centred research in its exploration of both the complexities of Parkinson’s dance as an arts-based therapeutic activity in the holistic treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and the complexities and challenges of collaboration in participatory research.
The panel will bring together and discuss insights that emanate from two collective research projects – one which is qualitative and participatory and one which combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Common to the insights is their origins in analyses of dancers’ own experiences of dance classes as an integrated part of their everyday life. The project combining qualitative and quantitative methods draws on a hermeneutic-phenomenological framework to explore dance couples’ experiences of everyday life with Parkinson’s disease and will construct a health profile for dancing couples based on quantitative data. The qualitative, participatory project draws on narrative medicine, dialogic communication theory, critical disability studies, and (auto)ethnography, and includes 43 participants in Parkinson’s dance classes as co-researchers in a series of co-creative workshops. The workshops use arts-based research methods to open up for bodily, aesthetic, visual and narrative ways of knowing.
The objective of the panel is to discuss, and further understanding of, the use of dance as a therapeutic arts activity in the holistic treatment of PD and the participation of people with PD and their relatives in research and research dissemination. The main focus points will be insights into the aesthetics of dancing, dancers’ health profiles and relational research ethics.