Award Date

May 2017

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Committee Member

Jennifer Keene

Second Committee Member

Takashi Yamashita

Third Committee Member

Michael I. Borer

Fourth Committee Member

Sandra Owens

Number of Pages

135

Abstract

A salient concern stemming from population aging is the expected rise in demand for informal family caregivers for diseases impacting the elderly, including dementia (MMMI 2010; NIA and WHO 2011). Studies of caregiver well-being often problematize the sociodemographic caregivers (e.g. gender, marital status) while caregiver intervention studies typically focus on the program itself (Gallagher-Thompson et al., 2008; Rabinowitz et al., 2006; Shulz et al., 2003). In this dissertation I unite these two bodies of caregiver research and examine how the sociodemographic characteristics of participants in a caregiver intervention program relate to the program’s effectiveness. I use secondary data from the Stress Management Project Dataset (Spiegel, 2001) and evaluate how participants’ social location (specifically, race and education) impacts the effectiveness of each program on caregivers’ depressive symptoms and stress. This study employed a sociological perspective to examine how social location (specifically race and education) impacts the benefits of a dementia caregiver intervention program. Using secondary data, I performed OLS regression analyses and found support for the initial hypothesis that suggested that the Coping with Caregiving (CWC) intervention would be more effective than the Telephone Support Control (TSC). There was no support for the remaining hypotheses that proposed that White caregivers with more education would benefit more from the program, or that the effects of race and education on caregiver outcomes would be contingent upon each other.

Keywords

Coping with Caregiving; Dementia caregiving; Intervention programs; Social location

Disciplines

Sociology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Download


Included in

Sociology Commons

Share

COinS