Abstract
The aim of this research was to clarify the factors related to the abuse caregivers' inflicted on seniors at home in need of care, and to examine what relations existed between the personal distance that caregivers keep from the seniors and the abuse. The intended subjects consisted of fifty-three caregivers. Twenty-seven of them were abusers and the remaining were not. We conducted two types of researches; 1) a questionnaire about whether they have abused seniors or not and why they inflicted the abuse, 2) "Personal Distance Test for Caregivers" (called "Personal Distance Test" for short below) that grasps in the projective technique the psychological distance that caregivers keep from care-needed persons. The "Personal Distance Test" is practiced as follows: in the various situations of supposed care, the subject will arrange the "caregiver card", which has an image of the caregiver on it, in the most suitable position he/she thinks on a square plate. There is also an image of a senior in the center of the square. This square is representative of a room containing both the caregiver and senior. The examiner then measures the distance between the image of the senior and the caregiver card. As a result of the questionnaire, we found out that more of the care-needed seniors who were abused showed symptoms of dementia and were highly independent. More of the caregivers who had abused care-needed persons answered that they had heavy burden of caring and had poor personal relations to the care-needed seniors. As a result of the Personal Distance Test, we found subjects could be roughly divided into two groups according to how they kept their distance personally. The first group is the inside type who put the caregiver card inside the room (the frame) where there are seniors, and the second is the outside type who put the card outside the room (the frame). The inside type subjects tend to keep a distance to the seniors in the case that the subjects generally need to bear active relations to the seniors, and to approach them in the case that the subjects are stimulated emotionally. As for those of the outside type, we observed that many of them had committed the abuses, such as desertion of care and abuse through ignorance. Furthermore, we categorized the subject's patterns of keeping a personal distance into four types through cluster analysis ; 1) Senior-centered, 2) Caregiver-centered, 3) Close, and 4) Distant. In the group of abusers, the Distant type and the Caregiver-centered type were dominant. In the case of the spouse's care, the Close type was dominant, and in the case of the daughter-in-law's care, the Senior-centered type was also dominant. When we tried to understand the personal relationships between caregivers and care-needed seniors, which is one of the factors of senior abusing, the viewpoint of personal distance can be an effective way to grasp the relations between them, and also give clues to the early discovery and prevention of abuse.
