Search results for ‘Subject term:"older people"’ Sort:
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Measuring the experience and perception of suffering
- Authors:
- SCHULZ Richard, et al
- Journal article citation:
- Gerontologist, 50(6), December 2010, pp.774-784.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
Suffering is an important but understudied domain, in part because of a lack of good measures of suffering. The aim of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of scales developed to assess experience and perception of suffering in older individuals. Three instruments were developed to assess each of the three domains of suffering: physical, psychological, and existential. The scales were administered to three populations of older persons and their family caregivers: 105 individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and their family caregivers; 53 married couples in whom 1 partner had osteoarthritis; and 121 African American and Hispanic caregivers of care recipients with Alzheimer’s disease. The care recipients rated their own suffering, whereas caregivers provided ratings of perceived suffering of their respective care recipients. In addition, quality of life, health, and functional status data were collected from all respondents via structured in-person interviews. The results demonstrated that the three scales showed high levels of internal consistency, test–retest reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity. The scales were able to discriminate differences in suffering as a function of type of disease, demonstrated high intra-person correlations and moderately high inter-person correlations and exhibited predicted patterns of association between each type of suffering and indicators of quality of life, health status, and caregiver outcomes of depression and burden.
Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health (REACH): overview, site-specific outcomes, and future directions
- Authors:
- SCHULZ Richard, et al
- Journal article citation:
- Gerontologist, 43(4), August 2003, pp.514-520.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This article describes the work of REACH (Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health), a multi-site research programme which carries out social and behavioural research on interventions designed to enhance family caregiving for Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. The research aims to test the effectiveness of multiple interventions and to evaluate the overall outcomes of such interventions.
Dementia caregiver intervention research: in search of clinical significance
- Authors:
- SCHULZ Richard, et al
- Journal article citation:
- Gerontologist, 42(5), October 2002, pp.589-602.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This article reviews intervention studies that reported dementia caregiver outcomes published since 1996, including psychosocial interventions for caregivers and environmental and pharmacological interventions for care recipients. The search focused on issues of clinical significance in caregiver intervention research in order to move the field toward a greater emphasis on achieving reliable and clinically meaningful outcomes. Although many studies have reported small to moderate statistically significant effects on a broad range of outcomes, only a small proportion of these studies achieved clinically meaningful outcomes. Nevertheless, caregiving intervention studies have increasingly shown promise of affecting important public health outcomes in areas such as service utilization, including delayed institutionalization; psychiatric symptomatology, including the successful treatment of major and minor depression; and providing services that are highly valued by caregivers.