Sharing Stories Instead of Explaining: New Approaches to Supporting Family Caregivers

Care often takes place behind the scenes. Millions of people care for relatives every day, often in addition to work, family and their own commitments. What sounds like caring often means constant stress, excessive demands and isolation in reality. The burden is particularly high for people who are also confronted with language or cultural barriers. Many existing support programmes barely reach them because they do not fit in with their everyday lives. This is precisely where a study involving the University of Witten/Herdecke (UW/H) comes in.

A new approach to care

In the joint project "Diversity-On", scientists from the Chair of Health Services Research at UW/H and other researchers spent three years developing a digital self-help programme for family carers - with a particular focus on people with a Turkish migration history, representing other groups that are often not reached by the existing selection. At the centre is an approach that initially sounds unusual: storytelling.

"Many programmes don't fail because of their content, but because people don't see themselves in them," says Kübra Annac, research assistant on the project. "Stories create identification and therefore a completely different approach."

Instead of classic advice texts, narrated experiences take centre stage. The stories developed are based on interviews with those affected and deal with typical situations from everyday caring life - such as time pressure, family conflicts or dealing with professional help. The stories are deliberately open-ended. They do not provide any solutions, but invite people to reflect on their own experiences and enter into dialogue with others.

Nine realities of life - one goal

The team has identified a total of nine different care constellations - from the overburdened sole carer to the relative who is caught between family expectations and their own needs. Each of these perspectives is represented by several stories.

The stories were used in moderated online groups: There, the researchers read and discussed them together with the participants. The results show that the approach works. The stories open up access to topics that often remain unspoken. They make complex situations more tangible and help people to recognise their own options for action. In practice, this means that support must be based more closely on people's experiences - just like the "story packages" developed in the project. They can be used beyond the project and can be used flexibly, for example in self-help groups or in counselling for family carers. The stories are available free of charge in German, Turkish and English and can be downloaded from the project website: https://www.uni-wh.de/diversity-on

Further information:

The "Diversity-On" project ran from January 2023 to December 2025 and was funded by the Innovation Fund of the Federal Joint Committee. It was carried out as a joint project by the Chair of Health Services Research at Witten/Herdecke University under the project management of Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin and in cooperation with Demenz Support Stuttgart gGmbH.