• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.35
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• pp.51-83
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• 1998

This study is designed to find out the determinants of housewives' caregiving behavior to their elderly parents-in-law. For this purpose, a tentative path model, constructed with major socio-demographic variables in the caregiver's family as exogenous variables, is proposed to account for caregiver's behavior to elderly parents-in-law. The model is estimated with data collected from a probability sample of housewives in Kwangju, Korea. Estimation of the model, separately for caregiver's fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law, in terms of maximum likelihood(ML) procedures in LISREL8 reveals that housewives' educational attainment, father-in-law's age, father-in-law's health status, and family size have statistically significant causal. effects on care giving behavior to fathers-in-law, and that housewives' educational attainment, mother-in-law's age, family size, and caregiving attitude have significant causal effects on caregiving behavior to mothers-in-law. Comparison of the two estimated models indicates caregiver's educational attainment, caretaker's age, and family size are prominent determinants of caregiving behavior that can be commonly generalized to the two models. Except for these common determinants, however, a nonnegligible amount of differences is identified between the two models. The findings are discussed and interpreted with suggesting some salient theoretical and policy implications.