Relationship between job satisfaction and the perceived difficulty of dementia care among professional caregivers in nursing homes

Abstract

  The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between job satisfaction and the perceived difficulty of dementia care among professional caregivers working in nursing homes. Questionnaires were distributed to 1,266 professional caregivers, of which 576 valid questionnaires were analyzed. This study developed a causal relationship model assuming that caregivers’ perceived difficulty of dementia care affects their job satisfaction, and examined the fitness of the model to the data and the relationships between variables, using structural equation modeling. As a result of analysis, it was found that this causal relationship model fits the data and that there is a significantly negative relationship between the perceived difficulty of dementia care and job satisfaction. These results suggest that to enhance professional caregivers’ job satisfaction, it is necessary to provide education programs that enable individual caregivers to increase their self-efficacy. Given that only a limited number of caregivers in certain facilities were surveyed and that the contribution rate of job satisfaction was only 5.2% and the explanation rate of this model was low, further studies need to be conducted.