Social Support of Elderly Caregivers

In this article, the author reviews the concept “social support” from western and eastern perspective, and the concept of adult child caregiver, finally analysize several cases from social support perspective.

that social support has not obvious impacts on caregiver burden.Some studies (Zarit, Reever, & Bach-Peterson, 1980;George & Gwyther, 1986) showed that informal social support is related to reduction in the negative outcomes of caring, and if without informal social support, the negative outcomes of caring increase (Vitalinano, Russo, Young, Teri, & Maiuro, 1991).Other studies (Scharlach & Frezel, 1986;Whiltlach, Zarit, & Eye, 1991;Frakin & Heath, 1992) found formal social support, such as home help services, respite care, adult daily care, family counseling or psychotherapy, and caregiver support groups, can also reduce caregiver burden.
Although there are some positive aspects to caring for frail elderly people, most researchers focus on the negative outcomes and have developed burden-coping models to explore how to adjust burden of caregivers.Bass and Noelker (1997) developed social support models for caregivers.Social support has been found to be beneficial to caregivers, as those who have access to the support of others have a lower level of depressive symptoms than those without social support.Specifically, caregivers who have more frequent contact with family and friends tend to have higher psychological wellbeing (Fengler & Goodrich, 1979) and lower levels of burden (Zarit, Reeves, & Bach-Peterson, 1980) than caregivers with less frequent contact with their social support network.Research in past decades began to validate the importance of social support for individual wellbeing (Caplan, 1974) by demonstrating the role that support networks play in "buffering" individuals from the harmful effects of stress (Cohen & Syme, 1985).In order to elaborate the buffering hypotheses, Cohen and Mckay (1984) proposed a stressor-support specificity model based on the assumption that various stressors pose various coping requirements.
Studies of caregiver burden and well-being have shown that social support is important to their well-being.Evidence suggested that caring for a frail elderly is an arduous task what may cause financial difficulties, emotional strain, or physical health problem (Brody, 1981;Cantor, 1983;Zarit et al., 1986), but the burden are less severe for those having a strong social support network (Zarit, Reever, and Bach-Perterson, 1980).Informal support networks alleviate negative aspects of caregiving as emotional distress, health concerns, and economic strain (Clip & George, 1990).
The author uses two categories of social support in the current study: perceived and received social support.Tardy (1985) viewed social support as either perceived social support that the focus is on the recipient's subjective appraisal of the acts performed by others that are either helpful or intended to be helpful, or received social support that others intend to assist a particular person.Kahn and Antonucci (1980) defined perceived social support as the perception of the individual of the amount and quality of support received from his/her social network.Hermalin et al. (1993) defined received social support as objective quantification of the help and aid people receive from their social network.Antonucci (1990) demonstrated perceived social support has stronger predicting power for the effects of social support on adaptation than the measure of received social support, but Hermalin (1993) claimed the measure of received social support provides good information for assessment of policy implications.Theorists (Dunkel-Schetter & Bennett, 1990;Thoits, 1995) have argued that perceived social support is conceptually distinct from received social support.Perceived social support generally represents moderately stable cognitive appraisals that support from others will be available when needed or that connections to others are secure (Sarason et.al., 1990).In contrast to perceived social support, received social support generally refers to actual administered aid or the behavior of engaging in positive interpersonal social exchanges (Dunkel-Schetter & Bennett, 1990).Research investigating both perceived and received social support in relation to well-being has generally followed the stress-buffering model (Cohen & Wills, 1985).The stress-buffering model posits that social support benefits wellbeing by protecting individuals from the detrimental effects of stress.

Family Support
Subjects experienced a lot of difficulties in caring for elderly parents.In order to lessen the burden, they would seek social support to mitigate the difficulties and negative feelings.

My husband is a very filial person. Not only is he filial to his parents but also to my parents. He always brings food and clothes to my mother. Everyone in our community says that he is very filial. (F1)
When I am unhappy for my mother's misunderstanding, I will talk with my husband.My husband will comfort me that I should understand my aged mother, although she sometimes misunderstands me.(F2) My daughter comes often.She will wash clothes and cook for my aged mother.(F2)

Extra Family Support
Adult child caregivers would ask for support from friends, neighbors, or other community members as a source of extra-familial support.This provided subjects with some comfort to lessen the burden.For most subjects, the family played a major role.Extra-familial support only served as a supplement to it.Subjects would turn outside the family if they could not receive available support from within it.