Abstract
This cross-sectional study was designed to investigate the status of social support, health service use and mental health among caregivers for the elderly in a Chinese rural community. With randomized stratified sampling method, 199 caregivers providing long-term care for the elderly recruited from a Chinese rural community responded to the survey and were administered the questionnaire, measuring the caregiving outcome for the elderly. The social support was assessed with the social support scale (SSS) and social network scale (SNS). Health service utilization was assessed with the questionnaire on health service use (HSU). Depression was evaluated with the Center for Epidemiological Studies—Depression Scale (CES-D). Most caregivers are elder’s spouse (39.7%), son (26.1%) and daughter-in-law (18.1%). Three common health service used by the caregivers are visiting physician (68.0%), help from relatives or friends (43.9%) and seeking help of herbal doctors or traditional healers (34.0%). Between caregivers for healthy and non-healthy elders, there was significant difference of depression scale score (t = 3.195, p < 0.01), not of SSS and SNS scale scores (p > 0.05). The score of depression scale are associated with caregivers’ age (β = 0.260) and income (β = −0.231), care-recipients’ gender (β = 0.187) and age (β = 0.800), caring time (β = 0.138) and the total SNS score (β = −0.194) (all p < 0.05). The findings suggest, in Chinese rural area, family provides main source for caregiving to the elderly, with spouse and sons playing central roles. Most often elderly caregivers utilize medical resources. Depression during the process of caregiving is associated with caregivers and care-recipients’ background characteristics, with potential mediator effect of social support. It is implied that social support may be important when providing mental health service to the elderly caregivers in Chinese rural areas.
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Acknowledgment
This study was supported in part by a research and training grant (5 D43 TW05809) from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health and a New Investigator Research Grant of Alzheimer’s Association (NIRG-04-1184, HW). The project was partly derived from an earlier incepted project under the mentorship of Prof. Byron Good, Prof. Authur Kleinman, Prof. Mary-Jo Good, and Dr. Alex Cohen from Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Prof. Dominic Lee from Department of Psychiatry, Chinese University of Hong Kong. The authors thank Fang-Zhi Liu, Yuan Xiao, Bin Wang, Yu Chen, Yao-Yao Gui, Xiao-Li Que, Gen-Mei Huang, Shui-Qing Liu, and Yu Nie for their contributions to data collection.
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Wang, H., Xiong, Q., Levkoff, S.E. et al. Social Support, Health Service Use and Mental Health Among Caregivers of the Elderly in Rural China. Ageing Int. 35, 72–84 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-009-9049-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-009-9049-0