Stress Coping Of Family Caregivers Of Older Adults

Family-centered care has shaped the main support model for the elderly in China. While with the rapid social and demographic changes in the transitional period, caregiving is becoming more and more demanding and challenging for Chinese caregiving families. As the backbone of the long-term care for the elderly, family caregivers and their well-being will and should become an increasingly significant issue in the years ahead.Different from the traditional deficit-orientation model, this thesis is based on resilience enhancement and strength perspective to study the stress coping of family caregivers of older adults. Embedding the individual micro system into the social macro system, this study is intended to investigate the strengths and potentials of family caregivers and their resources, on the basis of which to discuss the social work methods of strengthening family caregivers’social network, thus to form a more systematic and comprehensive stress-coping study.In-depth interviews were adopted to collect qualitative data from 16 family caregivers of older adults living in Yangpu District of Shanghai. The study has found that:(1) family caregivers are faced with diversified pressures in terms of physical, mental, economic and social aspects; (2) to cope with those risks, they have tried to adjust their emotion, cognition and behavior for a change; (3) as the great advantage, their internal initiative to seek changes and the strong ties dominated by family support are usually the first-as well as the most frequently-used resources for them to deal with stress; these strengths have played an important role in balancing family caregivers’ mental status and overcoming the shortage of helping hands, while as society changes they are also facing the risk of declining; (4) moreover, family caregivers’social resources in the macro system are relatively weak as there are no comprehensive polices or programmes designed for caregivers and their family, thus failing to relieve the multiple stresses they are facing; in this case, their needs for emotional support, skills training, financial assistance and social leisure etc. have become increasingly prominent.The findings, therefore, suggest the efforts to optimize and expand family caregivers’ network resources, which is also the target of the social work practice. At the micro level, casework focuses on the psychological adjustment and reconstruction of family caregivers; at the meso level, group work involves in the link and establishment of relationships between family caregivers and their mesoscopic system; at the community level, community work helps promote the evaluation and improvement of the community service; at the social level, social work administration intervenes in the advocacy and integration of related laws, regulations and social policies. By optimizing and integrating the resources from a multi-level angle, the social work practice helps enhance the protective factors of family caregivers’ social network, which benefits the promotion of individuals’ inherent resilience, ultimately reaching the aims of assisting family caregivers to cope with stress actively and effectively.