Abstract
The purpose of this study was to clarify the relationship of 'sekentei' to utilization of health, social and nursing services, and care burden for family caregivers of the impaired elderly. 'Sekentei' is the level of a person's self-consciousness of others observing one's behavior and endeavoring to meet the perceived norms of behavior. We analyzed 45 caregivers who answered the questionnaires. The results of this study were as follows: (1) Caregivers who had a higher 'sekentei' score showed a tendency to have a sense of resistance concerning the use of services. (2) The 'sekentei' score of caregivers who utilized the bathing service was higher compared with caregivers who did not utilize this service. (3) The 'sekentei' score was related to the total score and category scores for caregiver burden. These results indicate that effective nursing intervention for individual and community must be considered to facilitate use of services and alleviate the care burden related to individual consciousness of 'sekentei'.
