Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to investigate how caregiving tasks structure the lived-time experience of family caregivers of persons with dementia. Caregivers (n = 123) were recruited from the Alzheimer's Association Japan in October 1999. They were asked to keep a daily log of their caregiving activities for one week. From the total sample, 23 daily logs were selected and will be reported here. These logs comprise a total of 129 caregiving days and 1,586 total caregiving events. Content analysis identified 8 main categories of caregiving events : 1. ADL assistance ; 2. Medical management (medications and so on) ; 3. Social interaction and communication ; 4. Giving instructions and monitoring ; 5. Coping with problem behavior ; 6. Housekeeping ; 7. Going out for a walk or other activities ; 8. All others. The average daily caregiving time was 351 minutes(s.d. 215). Findings indicate that the highest frequency of caregiving occurred between the hours of 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. (18.1 % of all log entries). In a typical day, ADL assistance was the most frequent type of caregiving event(71.5%). In terms of simultaneity of tasks, dressing assistance often occurred with Giving instruction and monitoring. This also overlapped with Social interaction. Findings indicate that caregiving is a complex temporal event with caregivers typically performing multiple tasks at the same time. Better measures are needed to understand both the nature of caregiving time and its effect on caregiver's physical and mental health status.
