Table 2.
Characteristics of caregivers assisting community-living older adults receiving help with self-care and indoor mobility from a family/unpaid caregiver, stratified by caregiver-associated strain
| Caregiver characteristic | Full sample (N=3422) |
Low or moderate strain n=2702) |
High strain (n=720) |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Column percentages |
Row percentages | |||
| Age [mean (95% CI)] | 62.8 (62.1, 63.5) | 63.0 (62.6, 63.4) | 61.9 (61.2, 62.6) | 0.11 |
| Sex | ||||
| Male | 35.8% | 89.5% | 10.5% | p<0.001 |
| Female | 64.2% | 78.2% | 21.8% | |
| Relationship to OA | ||||
| Spouse | 44.6% | 82.6% | 17.4% | p<0.001 |
| Child | 39.3% | 79.4% | 20.6% | |
| Other | 16.1% | 88.1% | 11.9% | |
| Distance to Older Adult | ||||
| Coreside | 75.9% | 81.4% | 18.6% | p=0.10 |
| Less than 10 minutes | 14.5% | 84.7% | 15.3% | |
| More than 10 minutes | 9.6% | 85.1% | 14.9% | |
| Self-rated health | ||||
| Excellent or good | 73.7% | 86.3% | 13.7% | p<0.001 |
| Fair or poor | 26.3% | 70.8% | 29.2% | |
| Employed for pay | ||||
| No | 71.1% | 83.0% | 17.0% | p=0.17 |
| Yes | 28.9% | 80.5% | 19.5% | |
| Respite use | ||||
| No | 86.3% | 83.7% | 16.3% | p<0.001 |
| Yes | 13.7% | 73.1% | 26.9% | |
| Hours per week of care provided [mean (95% CI)] |
32.6 (30.8, 34.4) | 28.8 (27.8, 29.8) | 49.9 (47.8, 52.0) | p<0.001 |
Data drawn from National Long-Term Care Survey / Informal Care Survey data from 1999 (n= 791 dyads) and 2004 (n=1149 dyads), and National Health and Aging Trends Study / National Survey of Caregiving from 2011 (n= 736 dyads) and 2015 (n= 746 dyads). Data was weighted using NLTCS and NHATS weights as described in prior work (30). Statistical significance was assessed using chi-squared tests for categorical variables and t-tests for continuous variables.
High caregiving-associated strain was defined on the basis of a cut-point of 5 or greater on a scale of 0–9 based on six elements: caregiver appraisal of the difficulty of helping in three domains – emotional (0 = no difficulty; 1 = some difficulty; 2 = a lot of difficulty), physical (0–2), and financial (0–2) – as well as having no time for oneself (0 = false; 1 = true), being overwhelmed (0 or 1), and being exhausted (0 or 1).