Cross cultural issues in caregiving for persons with dementia: Do familism values reduce burden and distress?

Abstract

While family caregiving for persons with dementia has been recognized as a major stressor for over twenty years, attention to the role of cultural values in influencing the stress and coping process of caregivers is rarely studied. This article summarizes individual studies from our lab group that include Latino caregivers, Korean and Korean American caregivers, Japanese American caregivers, and African American caregivers. The role of familism as a cultural value that was assumed to lead to greater acceptance of the caregiving role and to better mental health outcomes for caregivers was explored in each of these groups. Familism was found to vary across groups as expected based on acculturation to Western values of individualism. However, the relationship of familism to caregiving burden was not consistent across ethnic groups and was either independent of caregiving outcomes, or was positively correlated with distress. These results suggest that assumptions about cultural influences on caregiving need to be reexamined and explored in greater depth empirically.