Editor’s selection: Diverse Issues in Caregiving

This issue features a special selection of articles addressing diverse issues related to caregiving among diverse populations and contexts. Caregivers providing care for the elderly include informal caregivers who provide care in the home, as well as those paid caregivers providing care in a range of institutional settings. Caregivers are mostly females and approximately 34 million individuals in the US provides informal caregiving to their family members (Research Report: Caregiving in the US 2015). Caregiving for older adults is a complex issue and although it has been written about extensively, there are still aspects of caregiving that remains unknown. In particular, the experiences of caregiving among some populations of underrepresented minorities and culture specific groups has not been well represented in the literature. In this issue, a range of caregiving contexts and perspectives are examined. Two articles examine the caregiving relations between mother and daughters but what makes their contributions unique is that these articles share the perspectives of low-income mother daughter dyads (Bower, Kemp, Burgess and Atkinson “Complexity of care: Stressors and strengths among low-income mother-daughter dyads”) and African-American daughters (McLennon, Anderson, Epps and Rose “It’s just part of life”: African American daughters caring for parents with dementia”). While the sample size of these studies is small limiting generalizability of the findings, the exploration of the perspective of these women offers a deeper understanding of the women included in the study.

Caregiving is not only a concern for families who provide care, but also for health care institutions working with older adults. The next two articles in this selection discusses the caregiving perspectives of nurses in Nigeria and health care workers in a prison. In Afolabi, Eboiyehi and Afolabi’s article “Gender analysis of nurses’ attitude towards care of the elderly with dementia in Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospitals Complex, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria,” speaks to the importance of prior experience with providing care to special populations serving as a predictor of providing care to the elderly. In addition to hospital settings, older adults also need care during their incarceration. A valuable perspective of health care workers in the prison is offered in the article “Health Care Needs of Older Women Prisoners: Perspectives of the Health Care Workers Who Care for Them” by Barry, Adams, Zaugg and Noujaim.

The final two articles in this issue takes a fresh look at the issue of caregiving burden. Lorca and Lay’s article “Multiple roles and subjective well-being of middle-aged women who are caregivers of elderly people in Chile” explored caregiver burden, a well-established construct. The article highlights the intersection of economic and health conditions with caregiving burden experienced by older adult caregivers in Chile. Caregiver burden is also impacted by the degree of impairment among those being cared for articulated in a “A meta-analysis of the association between caregiver burden and the dependent’s illness” by Rodrigues-Gonzalez and Rodriguez-Miguel.