Conflict, stress and coping in caring for the elderly at home : proposal for intervention

This thesis explores the experiences of caregivers caring for an elderly relative at home using qualitative and quantitative methodologies of data collection. Emphasis is particularly placed on conflict. In-depth interviews were conducted to explore the caring experiences of 30 female caregivers, while quantitative methods were employed on 151 caregivers both males and females to identify the predictors of interpersonal conflict and also to test the proposed conceptual model . To get detailed information of the caring situation two new measures were developed : one was a new instrument to quantify interpersonal conflict; the other was the ' Vignette' methodology, which tapped information about the caregivers' sensitivity to conflict and coping with conflict. All caregivers reported experiencing conflict 'in their relationship with the elderly person. Caregiving burden , coping strategy, the caregiver's attitude towards caring, the dependency of the elderly person in activities of daily living, predicted most of the conflict. The quantitative data also indicated a two-way interaction between coping strategies and conflict. Conflict was found to divide the caregivers into two groups: adopting adaptive coping and maladaptive coping. Maladaptive coping discriminated between those experiencing high conflict and those experiencing low conflict. Ineffective coping thus led to conflict while high confl ict led to ineffective coping. The study concluded with some interventions proposed to reduce the conflict in elder-caregiver relationships