The role of caregiver identity: effects on well-being and burden

• Autor(a) principal: Barros, Joana Raquel Mendes Figueiredo
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/6148
• topic: Caregiving burden; Multiple identities; Caregiver identities; Sobrecarga do cuidador; Múltiplas identidades; Identidade de cuidador

Several factors that explore the consequences of caregiving on caregivers’ well-being have been studied in these last few years. However, the effects of caregiving on an individual’s self-concept and social identity have not been sufficiently explored.The goal of the present study is to address this issue and determine whether the existence of multiple nonconflicting identities, could have an effect on caregiver’s well-being and burden. The identities that were tested in this study were of adult child, caregiver and worker, for the existing literature indicates that these can be important in the caregiving context. Following the proposal of the study conducted by Brook et. al. (2008) our hypotheses was that the importance of these identities should affect well-being and perceived burden, particularly when they have less harmony between them. These effects should be mediated by self-discrepancies emotions. For this study a total of 40 caregivers of their elder parents were interviewed, and data was collected, using a telephone based procedure. Contact with participants was made through three institutions that provide home help services to the care recipients. Only working, adult-child caregivers were considered for this study, in order to fully test the identities mentioned. A series of instruments were applied in order to test an adapted model (Brook et. al., 2008) which aimed to verify an interaction between the importance of identities, identity harmony and their effect on Well-Being and Caregiving Subjective Burden (CB). Emotions related to self-discrepancies were also included in this model, as a mediator of this interaction. As expected, results indicated a significant interaction between the caregiver and the worker identities’ importance and harmony on caregiver burden. We did not find any effects regarding the relationship between the importance of son/daughter identities. Moreover, no effects were found regarding the mediation effect by self-discrepancy emotions. These results are discussed based on the social psychological and caregiving literatures.