# Roybal Translational Research Center to Promote Context-Specific Caregiving of Community-Dwelling Persons Living with Alzheimer's Disease or Related Disorders

> **NIH NIH P30** · EMORY UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $281,998

## Abstract

Abstract. This application seeks support for an administrative supplement to the Emory Roybal Center for
Dementia Caregiving Mastery (P30AG06400). We seek to develop and test a broadly accessible and readily
scalable online fully asynchronous course for family caregivers of community-dwelling persons living with
dementing disorders like Alzheimer's disease to prepare them to master the new demands of their caregiving
role in the extraordinary circumstance of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Under normal circumstances,
caregivers need to learn how to guide their person through safe, calm, and pleasant days. In a time of COVID-
19, caregivers have to learn how to take all of the complicated precautions to keep themselves and their
persons from being exposed to the virus. They need skills for keeping their persons occupied and calm in a
“shelter in place” world where day programs or other regular outings to large group settings (e.g., places of
worship) are unavailable. And they need skills for navigating the healthcare system to manage their person's
health in ways that minimize the need to use emergency or acute services. We seek to produce an online
course that can be completed in 4-6 weeks that will develop and enhance caregivers' mastery not only to
provide effective day-to-day care guidance, but to ensure their care recipients' health and safety, and to
function as healthcare system navigators for their care recipients. The course will engage caregivers in self-
paced learning in a format tailored to and calibrated for a lay learning audience. It will be structured as a small
group “class,” of 20-30 participants who will interact virtually but never meet as a group, and whose activities
and exercises will be monitored by a course faculty member. In our Aim 1 activities, we propose to develop, in
collaboration with an educational design consultant team, the online course designed to teach these skills. The
project will seek input from caregivers, clinicians, and other experts – and used the Roybal Center's Design
Studio capacity – to develop the structure, content, and “feel” of the course and produce a testable prototype.
In our Aim 2 activities, we will recruit 100 family caregivers to take part in a quantitative and qualitative wait-list
control randomized trial of the prototype course. The trial will assess usability and acceptability and it will be
sufficiently powered to examine the preliminary efficacy of the course to develop caregiving mastery and
benefit caregivers' well-being. Formative evaluation data, course faculty observation, and course use data will
be used to produce a revised version of the course. MPIs Hepburn and Clevenger bring psychoeducation and
continuing education program development experience and extensive clinical and caregiver expertise to the
project – and an established working relationship with the educational consulting team. The Aim 2 test will
provide the basis for an application for a larger randomized t...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10147222
- **Project number:** 3P30AG064200-02S1
- **Recipient organization:** EMORY UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Carolyn Kay Clevenger
- **Activity code:** P30 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $281,998
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2019-09-15 → 2024-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10147222

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10147222, Roybal Translational Research Center to Promote Context-Specific Caregiving of Community-Dwelling Persons Living with Alzheimer's Disease or Related Disorders (3P30AG064200-02S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10147222. Licensed CC0.

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