Abstract
Caregivers and their trajectories through the caregiving process are highly heterogeneous. The Orlando Care and Aging Model (OCAM) is a process model that seeks to relate individual differences in early social development with caregiving trajectories and to characterize risk of outcomes including depression and caregiver burden. Central to the OCAM model are attachment style and filial obligation. This study examined the hypothesis that among adult child caregivers of parents with dementia, the combination of attachment characteristics and filial obligation among predicted depressive symptoms and caregiver burden. The sample included 163 United States residents using Mechanical Turk (MTurk) who self-identified as the primary caregivers of parents aged 65 years or older diagnosed with dementia or cognitive impairment resulting from a stroke. Participants completed self-report measures of depressive symptoms, attachment styles, filial obligation, and caregiver burden. Results of a bootstrapped regression model (5,000 iterations) using the PROCESS macro for SPSS were that filial obligation moderated the relationship between anxious attachment and caregiver outcomes (burden and depression). Caregivers with high levels of anxious attachment and low levels of filial obligation reported caregiver burden. High levels of anxious attachment, when moderated by filial obligation at any level, related positively with depressive symptoms; however, the relationship was strongest at low levels of filial obligation. The results of this study suggests that filial obligation may be a buffer against risk for caregiver distress discussed by insecure attachment characteristics. These findings suggest that the OCAM framework is useful for the study of diversity among caregiving trajectories.