Caregiving Appraisal in Family Caregivers of Older Adults

Objectives: With increasing the older adults’ population, the old age diseases increase, as well as older people’s dependency and need for care. This issue further highlights the importance of attention to family caregiving and experiences. Among the concepts related to family caregiving, the concept of selfappraisal of caregiver has a special role in acceptance, continuance, and outcomes of caregiving. This study aimed to review all aspects of caregiving appraisal concept in family caregivers. Methods & Materials: The current study is a review study. To examine the concept of family caregiver appraisal, all articles without time limitation were searched in databases of Google Scholar, ProQuest, Scopus, and PubMed with keywords of “appraisal,” “caregiving,” “family caregiving,” “burden,” “satisfaction,” “positive aspect,” “negative aspect,” “older adults,” and “elderly.” The Iranian databases of IranMedex, IranDoc, and SID were also searched with equivalent Persian Keywords. Results: Many factors such as social, cultural, and personal characteristics can influence the caregivers’ perception. This subjective appraisal makes caregivers not to perceive their conditions the same, in spite of stressful situation of caregiving. Some caregivers have positive experiences in this condition and some perceive stress more than what actually exist. This will create negative outcomes for the health and welfare of the caregivers. Conclusion: Caregiving appraisal is a multidimensional concept, which has positive and negative aspects. By taking into account all aspects of this concept, one can better understand and ultimately has a more comprehensive assessment of the status of caregivers, and implement effective interventions towards improving the health of this group