Family Caregiving and Marital Satisfaction: Findings from a 1-Year Panel Study of Women Caring for Parents with Dementia

Abstract

This study uses quantitative and qualitative data collected from 94 daughters and daughters-in-law to examine the effects of care giving on marital satisfaction across the first year of caring for an elderly parent with dementia. While there was no change in mean marital satisfaction scores. More than one-third of the women reported notably lower or higher scores by the end of the year. Analyses indicated that changes in the women's marital satisfaction were associated with variations' in their husbands' emotional support and hindrance of the caregiving effort. Husbands' support and hindrance were affected by the husbands' perceptions that caregiving interfered with their wives' performance of traditional family roles. Husbands' instrumental support did not help to explain changes in caregivers' marital satisfaction across the year. During the past 15 years a great deal of attention has been directed toward understanding the effects of women's multiple roles on marital quality. While this literature has examined the effects of several important roles, including employment (cf. Barker, 1993; Booth, Johnson, White, & Edwards, 1984; Ladewig & McGee, 1986; Spitze & South, 1985; Vannoy & Philliber, 1992), parenthood (cf. Belsky, Lang, & Rovine, 1985; Cowan et al., 1985; Feldman & Nash, 1984; Miller & Sollie, 1980; White & Booth, 1985), and becoming a college student in midlife (Suitor, 1987, 1988), limited attention has been paid to the effects of the increasingly common role of caring for elderly impaired parents. The few studies that exist on the effects of caregiving on adult children's marital quality have been limited by the use of cross-sectional data. These investigations have found that relatively few adult children or children-in-law report that caregiving affects their marital relationships detrimentally (cf. Cantor, 1983; Horowitz, 1985; Kleban, Brody, Schoonover, & Hoffman, 1989), but the reliance on cross-sectional data limits the reliability of these findings. In contrast, the present study uses longitudinal data collected from 94 women at the beginning and the end of the first year of caring for a parent or parent-in-law with dementia to examine changes in marital satisfaction. In addition to investigating the extent of changes in marital satisfaction across the first year of care, this study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to explore the factors that may lead to these changes. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Status Transitions and Interpersonal Relations Research on interpersonal relationships has demonstrated that relations with friends and family members are often changed by status transitions such as becoming divorced, widowed, unemployed, returning to school, or reentering the labor force. The transitions that appear to have the greatest potential for transforming relationships are those that result in the violation of expectations regarding the individual's performance of roles specific to those relationships. Thus, for example, unemployment often produces conflict in men's relationships with their wives (Larson, 1984; Lorenz, Conger, Simon, Whitbeck, & Elder, 1991; Newman, 1988), as well with their parents and siblings (cf. Newman, 1988), due to changes in the husbands' ability to provide economically for their wives and children and to maintain economic independence from their other relatives. For women, the transitions that appear to be the most likely to produce conflict in preexisting relationships are those that cause the women to violate the cultural mandate (Coser, 1991) that women give highest priority to their family responsibilities. While such violations have the potential to create conflict in a variety of role relationships, the marital relationship appears to be particularly vulnerable to these effects. For example, women who return to school full-time while raising small children experience increased discord in their marriages, because their commitment to academic life interferes with their performance of traditional family roles (Suitor, 1987). …