A mixed methodological examination of older adults’ psychological reactance toward caregiving messages from their adult children

ABSTRACT

This study extends psychological reactance theory (PRT) to family caregiving by exploring autonomy-threatening messages adult child caregivers use to gain compliance from older adult parents. Results of focus groups and interviews with older adult care recipients (Study One) and caregivers (Study Two) corroborated three types of autonomy-threatening messages, which were used to test PRT (Study Three). Older adults (N = 281) were randomly assigned a caregiving message and answered reactance-related survey questions. Results supported serial mediation: relative to an autonomy-supporting message, two types of autonomy-threatening messages (i.e., offering directives, expressing doubt) triggered greater freedom threat, which amplified reactance. In turn, greater reactance elicited more negative attitudes, which was linked to lower behavioral intention. Results offer implications for older adults’ experience of reactance and family caregiving communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychological reactance theory
• family caregiving
• older adults
• autonomy-supporting language
• perceived freedom threat

Acknowlegements

Research involving human subjects was approved by West Virginia University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB # 1602002504, #1602008655, and #1604074580).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Toward our goal of identifying the types of caregiving messages that adult children realistically use with their older adult parents, Studies One and Two adhered to sample size recommendations for code saturation (i.e., sufficiently identifying the range of themes present within the data) within focus group and interview research (see Hennink et al., 2019).

2 We found equivalent results when using indicator and Helmert coding schemes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a West Virginia University Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Doctoral Research Award.