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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Widowhood and the end of spousal care-giving
— relief or wear and tear? | | Author(s) | Jennifer Reid Keene, Anastasia H Prokos |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 28, part 4, May 2008 |
| Pages | pp 551-570 |
| Source | http://www.journals.cambridge.org/ASO |
| Keywords | Widows ; Widowers ; Spouses as carers ; Depression ; Symptoms ; Longitudinal surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The impact of spousal care-giving on survivors' depressive symptoms 6 months into widowhood is analysed, and the applicability of a "relief model" of spousal adjustment during bereavement is examined. The authors examined several aspects of the care-giving situation, including caregiver stress, caregiving demands, and type and duration of care, and how these affect survivors' depressive symptomatology. The sample is drawn from two waves of the US Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) survey, which was conducted in the Detroit Metropolitan Area, Michigan (MI). The first wave of data was collected from couples, and the second from the surviving spouse 6 months after the partner's death. Multiple regression analysis was used to examined the effects of key variables on depressive symptoms 6 months into widowhood, controlling for various demographic characteristics and personal circumstances. The results demonstrate that the duration of caregiving is the most influential predictor of survivors' depressive symptoms 6 months after the death. Indeed, long-term caregivers experience greater relief than both non-caregivers and short-term caregivers, as the predicted probabilities indicate. The results lead us to emphasise that caregiving and spousal bereavement should be studied as related processes rather than distinct phenomena. Indeed, relief from a chronically stressful care situation may actually ameliorate the negative effect of spousal loss from survivors. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-080425005 A |
| Classmark | SP: SPA: P6:SN: ENR: CT: 3J: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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