The Costs and Rewards of Caregiving Among Aging Spouses and Adult Children

Using a social exchange perspective and data from a national sample of 978 spouse and child caregivers of older family members, this study assessed the association between caregiver relationship and gender and the costs and rewards of caregiving. We also evaluated whether relationship and gender moderate the effects of helpfulness on caregiver costs and rewards. Results supported the hypotheses that women, whether wives or daughters, experience more caregiving costs than do men, and that adult children experience more rewards than do spousal caregivers. In addition, care recipient helpfulness was associated with greater increases in rewards for spousal caregivers than for adult children caregivers. Key Words: family caregiving, intergenerational exchanges, social exchange theory. (Family Relations, 2004, 53, 317-325) Research on family caregivers has provided only a partial picture of the heterogeneity that exists among caregivers. With a few exceptions (e.g., Neal, Ingersoll-Dayton, & Starrels, 1997), such research has compared the experiences of select subgroups, such as spousal caregivers (Barusch & Spaid, 1989; Bookwala & Schulz, 2000) or adult children caregivers (Horowitz, 1985; Ingersoll-Dayton, Neal, & Hammer, 2001). Examining caregiving across a spectrum of family relationships is important because the processes and consequences of caregiving may be experienced differently depending upon whether the caregiver is a man or woman or a spouse or adult child (Dwyer & Seccombe, 1991; Young & Kahana, 1989). Here we address this gap by examining gender and relationship differences in the costs and rewards of caregiving. Further, we focus on how help from the care recipient differentially contributes to such consequences for caregiving wives, husbands, sons, and daughters. Applying Social Exchange Theory to Caregiver Relationships Our work uses social exchange theory (Thibaut & Kelley, 1986), which emphasizes the interdependence in dyadic relationships and mutual exchanges. Further, social exchange theory proposes that within dyadic relationships, the behaviors of each participant influence the psychological costs and rewards of the other. Costs might include feelings of conflict, embarrassment, or anxiety, whereas rewards could include feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, and gratification. As applied to caregiving, social exchange theory highlights two important areas of study. First, caregiving for an older person results in both costs and rewards to those who provide care. Lawton, Moss, Kleban, Glicksman, and Rovine (1991) have referred to this concept as the "mixed valence" (p. 182) of caregiving, because caregivers generally experience both positive and negative emotions as a result of their responsibilities. In general, research on caregiving has emphasized more the costs of caregiving, and in so doing has obscured its rewards (Kramer, 1997b; Walker, Pratt, & Eddy, 1995). Second, caregiving involves a mutual exchange between the care recipient and the caregiver. Although supportive exchanges are bidirectional between older spouses, as well as between elderly parents and their adult children (Acitelli & Antonucci, 1994; Ingersoll-Dayton & Antonucci, 1988; Walker, Pratt & Oppy, 1992), researchers have focused on unilateral support within the caregiving context-that is, they emphasize the help given to care recipients and often ignore the contributions of care receivers in the dyadic exchange (Walker et al., 1995). In the following section, we review the literature on these two aspects of caregiving as they are illuminated by social exchange theory. We examine the research pertaining to the costs and rewards of caregiving, and we turn to a small body of literature on the help provided by care recipients to their caregivers. Each of these bodies of research is examined from the perspective of gender and relationship differences among family caregivers. …