Staying socially connected and mentally active with group storytelling
Storytelling Connects® is an activity that helps socially isolated people, their families and carers to experience structured interaction by participating in group storytelling. Storytelling is popular with social prescribers and others who facilitate activities within institutions and Storytelling Connects is designed for people who want to stay mentally flexible and enjoy the company of others. It consists of pictures and prompts to stimulate the parts of the brain involved in learning and memory and it supports social connections and wellbeing. The activity is simple, low cost, portable, and adaptable.
The colour-coded prompts in Storytelling Connects lend simplicity to the game, the card decks give it portability, and the procedure is adaptable for a range of users. Images are contemporary and sufficiently flexible to form a number of different storyboards. The prompts invite sensory associations and are grouped to provide an underlying structure. Storytelling Connects provides integration of the senses through the prompt cards and use of QR codes that link directly to an audio fragment, e.g. children playing.
The research underpinning the activity is based on the recognised benefits of personal agency and social activity. Personal agency can be measured linguistically in social interaction by identifying markers such as a speaker’s initiating an exchange, e.g. by asking a question. Speaking first in this way is an example of pro-action rather than reaction. Other linguistic indicators are the density of personal pronouns (‘I/We’) and use of imperative forms (e.g. ‘Pick up a card’). A recent empirical study shows that tokens of agency are more likely to occur during in-the-moment talk than in other conversation components. Playing a card game is by definition a social activity that takes place in-the-moment and requires agency of the players in the form of personal expression and negotiation.
So far, Storytelling Connects has largely been used with older people, and people with dementia, but it can be adapted for any group who would enjoy a fun and sociable brain workout and is also well-suited to children and language learners.
Things to consider
Storytelling Connects may not be suitable for participants with mid- to late-stage dementia or for people who dislike card games. As with all psycho-social activities, participants’ enjoyment depends on expectations and the local context. For example, are participants used to a routine that involves the occasional introduction of novel activities, or do they prefer a predictable schedule that has become familiar with time? It needs to be an opt-in activity.
If the setting is a day care centre rather than a residential or nursing home, participants will be less institutionalised and, as visitors, more likely to take a flexible approach to their recreation. Much will depend on the skills of the activities manager or other facilitator. The manager or facilitator’s personality and enthusiasm will be key to setting the tone and energy of the storytelling, especially with less cognitively able participants.
The major weakness of the storytelling approach is its demand on participants’ interest, motivation, attention and long-term memory. Storytellers will need to form some empathic interest in the characters or other images on the cards to want to spend time with the rest of the group exploring the world the characters inhabit, or the other images represent.
Participants must be motivated to follow the sequence of contributions from other group members and not just make their own contribution. They will need to attend to everyone’s input to become familiar with the characters and events constructed by the other participants. Finally, they will have to remember characters’ biographies and the twists and turns of the fictional events as they unfold.
Actions that could be taken to mitigate some of these concerns include reducing the number of cards dealt to each participant while ensuring enough are selected to provide the ingredients of a story. On the other hand, the various demands make the process participatory and engaging. Participants become lost in the fictional world being constructed.
Affordances include the activity’s portability, adaptability, and economy of space. All that is needed is the activity pack, a table, and chairs for 4-6 players.
Adaptations for people with disabilities include:
- tabletop card-display stands
- enlarged copies of text and images
- a smaller number of cards, e.g. (part of) one theme, i.e. 3-4 cards, per person
- a single image and several prompts to explore it
- avoidance of images or prompts known to hold negative associations for (a) participant(s)
- removal of QR code cards to simplify the procedure
Practical steps
Each pack of cards contains 60 pictures cards and 60 prompt cards. The pictures are arranged in five themes: Beach, Birthday, Fishing, Urban, and Woods, each with 12 pictures. The prompts are Character (14), Sensory (14), Plot (15) and Ending (17). The prompts support players in creating a story around the pictures. Players must work together to make up an imaginative story based on the cards they hold.
How to play the game
All the prompt cards are placed face down in four piles (Character, Sensory, Plot, and Ending) in the middle of the table. The picture cards are shuffled and dealt to players. Players hold the picture cards in their hand. Play proceeds clockwise.
The first player picks a prompt card from the top of the Character prompt pile, shows it to the other players, and reads it aloud, e.g. ‘Where do they live?’, before returning the card to the bottom of the pile. The first player then selects any picture from their hand, lays it face up in the centre of the table, and responds to the prompt, e.g. ‘Philippa lives in a market town called Matlock.’ Players should name the people on the card they play even if they don’t pick up a Character prompt like, ‘What are their names?’ When all players have responded to one or two Character prompts, they move on to the Sensory prompt cards, then the Plot prompts, and finally the Ending prompts. Players decide whether to play only one Ending card or for all players to pick an Ending card to finish the story.
Some of the Sensory cards have QR codes that play a sound. Where no internet is available, the associated icon will suggest a sound that players can imagine or reproduce themselves or describe in words.
Variations
Players can invent their own versions of the activity, e.g. following up a picture card that responds to a Sensory prompt with a second picture that they link in. The first player to run out of picture cards chooses an Ending card to finish the story.
Duration
A game lasts approximately 45-60 minutes.
Tips
Keep pen and paper handy to write down characters’ names.
Flexibility
Players can decide to include all five themes (60 pictures) in a game or only one or two themes (12 or 24 pictures) if they want a quicker activity or have fewer players.
Facilitator and workshop guides are available on the Storytelling Connects website:
150 printed packs of cards are also available for the cost of postage – please contact Simon Williams for more information.
Following up
Where possible, it’s important to offer participants a range of formats and settings on different dates, and to make each occasion self-standing, as responses may be influenced by factors such as familiarity with other group members, ability to relate to content, and in-person or online delivery.
Mini case study
This is an account of a healthy ageing project whose aim was to develop a product that would make a positive contribution at scale to the lives of people diagnosed with dementia. The project was funded by UKRI (£62.5K) and actively managed by Zinc Investment Management LLP.
The project goal was to develop a psychosocial intervention that would assist people in the early stages of dementia, who were perhaps experiencing social isolation, in forming and maintaining relations with less well-known others.
Participants’ commitment to the project ranged from attending a single workshop to a series of workshops across several months. In all cases, their feedback resulted in adjustments to the process and content of the activity, and the size, shape and number of Storytelling Connects cards.
Altogether, 19 storytelling workshops were held, the majority of which were unique occasions whose participants attended once only. This was usually the case where healthy volunteers attended and travelled independently, e.g. a National Innovation Centre for Ageing Voice-organised workshop at the University of Sussex (24 May 2023).
In contrast, the researchers were able to visit some service institutions such as day centres and care homes on three or four occasions and many of those participants remained the same. An exception was the DEFIN’YD group, who were participating in a separate study (Parkes, 2023) and agreed to contribute to Storytelling Connects. The DEFIN’YD members’ first participation was as three regional subgroups (North, Midlands, South) for an online introduction to the activity on different dates (January-February 2023). They gave a mixed response to the concept and materials. Several suggested inviting players to bring their own pictures or for organisers to provide one generic image, such as one from the various Robert Opie Scrapbooks (e.g. Opie, 2004), because the content would be generally recognisable. Others were positive (‘Communication is important for everyone – great idea!’; ‘Brilliant!’; ‘All the input: brilliant!’).
Various members agreed to participate in an online workshop a few weeks later (16 March, 2023), and prototype cards were sent by post ahead of the call. Some members had written stories in advance based on the material they were sent, and the feedback was generally critical: 1-4 images would have been enough; the characters were difficult to relate to; sharing ideas with unfamiliar people was challenging. Nevertheless, a few months later, the researchers were invited to offer another workshop for some of the same participants at the closing conference of the DEFIN’YD project (University of Northampton, 25 July 2023). Two of the researchers facilitated small groups (5-6 participants each) and reaction to the in-person experience was much more positive.
Unlike the peripatetic participation of DEFIN’YD members, users of a local day centre, the Hop 50+ Cafe, Hove (The Hop 50+, 2024) contributed to the project from a single location. The cafe is a social centre that offers hot meals and activities for the over-50s, run by Social Prescribers and specialist facilitators. Friday morning and afternoon sessions are given to people living with early-stage dementia, and here the central role of the facilitator became clear and plans to expand the sensory aspect of the activity were discarded.
Hop 50+ service users participated in two workshops(1 August 2023 and 26 January 2024) and tried out scents to accompany some Sensory cards at the August meeting. Samples of 11 scents were ordered from Aromaco and arrived as dip sticks coated in fragrance and wrapped in plastic. The chemical-smelling scents could not be transferred to the cards without contaminating the whole deck, so the dip sticks were carried separately. The participants requested the Woods theme cards, and three scents (earth, leather, wood smoke) to match were handed out with the prompt, ‘What can they smell?’. The participants were fascinated by the samples and asked the player with the Sensory prompt to pass around the dip stick. It was at this point that the facilitator and a participant pointed out the potential health risks of sharing the same stick. Combined with the cost of scented ink and the technical challenge of confining scents to cards, the participant experience ended the plan.
