• Perspectives in Nursing Science
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.47-60
• /
• 2006

BACKGROUND: Social, legal, and economic factors have changed the delivery of care to elderly who are frail and/or chronically ill. Increasing number of the elderly are now treated in the community, while living with or in close proximity to their family. It is evident that families play a major role of support for elderly persons in our society. This paper provides a review and analysis of studies that have investigated informal caregiving issues encompassing physical, psychological, emotional, and social domains. RESULTS OF THE REVIEW: Family caregiving often interfered with workplace and other responsibilities, creating physical, emotional, and financial stress for caregivers. Relatively high volumes of research addressed caregiving issues in the families of Alzheimer patients and in the areas of emotional and psychological impact of caregiving. Few studies explicitly investigated the role of informal caregivers in the management of other chronic conditions such as stroke or depression or physical consequences of long-term caregiving. While most studies were focused on negative aspects of caregiving, a few studies found it rewarding. Often the burden, stress, and socio-economic effects on the family caregiving for an elderly person were not sufficiently appreciated. CONCLUSIONS: Positive outcomes for both the caregiver and the care recipient are more likely to occur when effective levels of collaboration exist between health professionals and caregivers. As a first step, a better understanding of the caregiving experience such as caregiver characteristics, care recipient characteristics, and social stigma is important for nurses to minimize the burden of care so that appropriate interventions can be developed. In addition, further studies are needed to examine the role and needs of informal caregivers in the care of increasing number of frail and/or chronic ill elderly treated in the community.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
• /
• v.56 no.4
• /
• pp.123-147
• /
• 2004

The purposes of this study are, 1) to explore the factors related to the family caregivers' preferences for service utilization both of the community-based welfare and health-care services, and 2) to examine the reasons why not want to use services analyzing a survey data obtained from family caregivers(n=1,000). Anderson and Newman's Behavior model was employed to examine the factors related to the preferences for service utilization. The main results are as follows. 1) Logistic regression analyses demonstrated that predisposing factor(such as age and relations with frail elderly) and enabling factor(such as economic status, secondary caregiver, informal informational support provider, etc) were significant predictor for caregivers' preference for service utilization. Contrary to an expectation, needs factor was negatively related to the preference for service. More specifically, the more they have service needs, the less they show their willingness to use community-based service both in welfare and health-care services except for care education program. 2) Caregiver identified 'family caregiving consciousness'(family should take care of frail elderly, elderly dislike be taken care of) as an important reason not want to use community services next to financial factor. These findings have several implications for policy making especially for 'public long-term care insurance' which was planned to start in 2007.

• 한국노년학
• /
• v.28 no.4
• /
• pp.1249-1264
• /
• 2008

Guilt feelings are dysfunctional feelings that the primary caregiver of the frail elder are apt to have and those feelings increase a burden of caring, while there is lack of empirical study on the effect of guilt feelings on caring behaviors. In light of this, this study lays its purpose on examining the effect of the primary caregivers' guilt feelings on their burden of caring and request behaviors for help with caring, paying attention to their guilt feelings in our society where Confucian values toward supporting the elderly have remained. The questionnaire survey was conducted for 220 primary caregivers caring frail elders over 60 years of age by visiting. As a tool for measuring guilt feelings, a self-designed measure for caregivers was used (${\alpha}=.949$), and factors of guilt feelings were classified into four namely, the factors of lack of self-control, lack of resources, burnout, and the normative factor As a result, the following findings were derived. First, it was revealed that the guilt feelings of caregivers as family members have a positive correlation with a feeling of burden of caring and the feeling of burden have even effects on the four factors of guilt feelings. Second, when primary caregivers request help with caring, they feel guilty toward cohabiting family members and neighbors, and also they show no guilt feelings when using day-care services for the elderly. Especially, guilt feeling factors affecting primary caregivers were found to be the normative factor to cohabiting family members, the factor of lack of resources to neighbors, and the factor of burnout to using day-care services for the elderly. This result tells that the dysfunctional feelings of primary caregivers namely guilt feelings arising when asking help with caring not only increase their burden of caring but also can cause difficulties in sharing the role of the caregiver. Accordingly for the mental health of caregivers, we should develop programs with which we could understand and cope with their guilt feelings.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.1-23
• /
• 2016

This study analyzes the effects of caring for grandchildren on Korean grandparents' health, using the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging from 2006 to 2012. We investigate how caregiving is provided and analyze the effects of caregiving on grandparents' physical health, mental health, and health-related behaviors. As elderly people's health is generally frail, it is unclear whether the provision of childcare affects their health negatively. We control for the endogeneity of caregiving by an individual fixed effect (FE) model and instrumental variable-fixed effect (FE-IV) models. Using these models, we determine the endogeneity of caregiving and show that the significant effects of caregiving on health disappear as we control for endogeneity in the FE and FE-IV models. Even after controlling for endogeneity, we find that caregiving increases the probability of feeling pain as well as the number of different types of pain. Furthermore, caregiving increases the probability of restrictions on daily activities because of pain. On the other hand, caregiving reduces the symptoms of depression. In relation to health-related behaviors, caregiving reduces the probability of physical exercise and regular meals. Our results imply that although caregiving has a positive effect on mental health, the increase in physical pain and in non-healthy behaviors may lead to a deterioration of the caregiver's long-term health, which in turn may increase the medical costs of the elderly. Potential policy alternatives are discussed in the paper.