IMPACTS OF CAREGIVING ON WELL-BEING AMONG SPOUSAL CAREGIVERS TO OLDER ADULTS USING COARSENED EXACT MATCHING

Abstract

Abstract Spousal caregivers to older adults may be at increased risks of negative health outcomes because they are also dealing with their own aging and health issues. Estimating the impacts of caregiving without controlling for caregivers’ own aging and aging-related health decline could exaggerate the negative health consequences of caregiving, whereas focusing on caregivers only could face the risk of selection bias where healthier individuals enter and/or remain in caregiving. In this study, we used coarsened exact matching to compare outcomes in wellbeing between spousal caregivers and spousal non-caregivers. Pooled panel data from Wave 8 to Wave 13 in the Health and Retirement Study was utilized with two consecutive waves of data for each spousal caregiver. The sample included 203,162 person-wave observations from 5,162 unique individuals, among whom 3,577 were spousal caregivers. Variables used for matching were classified into three categories: care obligations, the willingness to provide care, and the ability to provide care. Outcome of interest was depressive symptoms measured by CES-D 8. A total of 2,741 (81.01%) spousal caregivers were matched with 18,043 observations of spousal non-caregivers. Regression analysis indicated that being a spousal caregiver was statistically significantly associated with a 0.27 unit increase in depressive symptoms in the subsequent wave, after controlling for other potentially confounding variables such as caregiver’s race/ethnicity, length of current marriage, etc. Our results highlighted the elevated needs to address mental health among spousal caregivers, and indicated that long-term care program and policy should take into consideration the mental health among spousal caregivers.