Experience of Caregivers for Older Adults in Rural Ethiopia: Challenges and Available Social Support for Family Caregivers in Co-Residential Living Arrangement.
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Family and kinship care is a common way of caring for older adults, particularly in rural Ethiopia, where institutional care arrangements are nonexistent. Moreover, the majority of studies on family caregivers of older adults were conducted in western cultures, which makes it difficult to understand family caregivers in the Ethiopian context. This study aims at exploring the experience of family caregivers for older adults in a co-residential setting. Specifically, it focuses on answering caregiving challenges and available social supports for family caregivers in a co-residential living arrangement. This study used a qualitative research method employing phenomenology to understand the lived experience of family caregivers for older adults in rural northwestern Ethiopia. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview with eight purposefully selected family caregivers of rural older adults. Regarding family caregivers's challenges and available social supports, four themes emerged from the collected data. These are economic challenges, the incongruence of older adult needs and caregiving capacity, work-caregiving conflict, work-social life conflict, and the presence of social support from different individuals and community-based institutions. In addition to strengthening caregiver support environments, it's critical to develop the capacity of family caregivers through training, economic support, and the integration of family caregivers with health extension workers.
期刊介绍:
Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine (GGM) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed open access journal where scholars from a variety of disciplines present their work focusing on the psychological, behavioral, social, and biological aspects of aging, and public health services and research related to aging. The journal addresses a wide variety of topics related to health services research in gerontology and geriatrics. GGM seeks to be one of the world’s premier Open Access outlets for gerontological academic research. As such, GGM does not limit content due to page budgets or thematic significance. Papers will be subjected to rigorous peer review but will be selected solely on the basis of whether the research is sound and deserves publication. By virtue of not restricting papers to a narrow discipline, GGM facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers.