Roughly a quarter of adults in the U.S. are caring for elderly family members or children with an illness or disability - and sometimes both at the same time. Despite family caregiving consuming time and resources for both individuals and governments, social scientists don't fully understand how it affects the people who do the caregiving, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State. In collaboration with colleagues at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota, the researchers conducted an expansive study of caregiver well-being, finding that the type of geographic location and individual circumstances can impact a caregiver's health, comfort and happiness even more than their state's family care policies.
In findings recently published in Rural Sociology, the researchers reported that rural and suburban caregivers were more likely to have low or medium well-being, and less likely to have high well-being compared to urban caregivers. And caregivers' personal characteristics - such as age, income and education - had a stronger effect on their well-being than the family care policies of the state they live in. However, the researchers concluded, family-care policies can make a difference in well-being when they take into account the differences among rural, suburban and urban areas - especially in terms of available support and infrastructure.
"Although caregiving can be an emotionally rewarding and satisfying experience, caregivers often face significant stress and challenges in their roles, and the impacts of caregiving on well-being are often overlooked by researchers and policymakers," said Elena Maria Pojman, first author on the paper and a doctoral degree candidate in sociology and demography in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Penn State.
