Territorial and Gender Differences in the Home Care of Family Members with Dementia

Sagrario Anaut-Bravo,María Cristina Lopes-Dos-Santos

doi:10.3390/land11010113

Sagrario Anaut-Bravo, María Cristina Lopes-Dos-Santos

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/land11010113

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Abstract

The increasing prevalence of dementia is threatening the capacity of health and social service systems to provide long-term care support at the territorial level. In both rural and urban areas, specific family members (gendered care) are responsible for the daily care of their relatives. The aim of this work is to explore gender and territorial implications in the provision of in-home care by family members. To this end, family caregivers in Navarre, Spain, were administered the Psychosocial Adjustment to Illness Scale (PAIS-SR) and a semi-structured interview. The results show the good psychosocial adjustment of caregivers of relatives with dementia but the negative impacts of caregiving in the domestic, relational, and psychological domains. Moreover, the feminization of psychological distress was found to predominate in rural areas since mainly women are responsible for instrumental and care tasks, while men seek other complementary forms of support. Place of residence (rural vs. urban) was found to exert a strong effect on the respondents’ conception, life experience, and provision of care. Consequently, territorial and gender differences in coping with and adjusting to care require the design of contextualized actions adapted to caregivers’ needs.

Highlights

Current evidence on family caregivers’ adjustment to dementia, among other diseases [1,2,3], has shown that among them, place of residence and sex/gender are increasingly important variables to consider in this process.In Spain, studies addressing psychological adjustment in the context of in-home care must be framed in an extensive tradition of both regional and urban studies linked to historical and political events that continue to resonate today [4,5,6]
The results reveal that the processes of coping and adjusting to dementia among family caregivers in Navarre differ according to place of residence and sex
Processes of psychosocial adjustment among family caregivers differ depending on their place of residence and gender

Summary

Introduction

Current evidence on family caregivers’ adjustment to dementia, among other diseases [1,2,3], has shown that among them, place of residence and sex/gender are increasingly important variables to consider in this process.In Spain, studies addressing psychological adjustment in the context of in-home care must be framed in an extensive tradition of both regional and urban studies linked to historical and political events that continue to resonate today [4,5,6]. In contrast to the extensive literature on economic issues, territorial policies, or regional imbalances in Spain [6], regional studies on quality of life and welfare in the country remain scarce This approach is recent and crosses disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and the health sciences. As it occurs in other countries, there are few comparative studies on the care of the elderly and people with neurodegenerative diseases in rural and urban spaces [10,11,12,13]. The effects of these different processes of change question the validity of a definition of rural and urban reduced solely to locality size, population density, and the dominant economic sector [4,13,20,21,22]

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