Time Use and Emotional Wellbeing of Family Caregivers: The Role of Dementia
Vicki Freedman1, Jennifer Cornman2, Jennifer Wolff3
1University of Michigan, 2Jennifer C Cornman Consulting, 3Johns Hopkins University
Impending increases in the number of older adults living with dementia has raised concerns about the time demands and wellbeing of family caregivers. Yet in-depth contrasts between daily experiences of dementia and other family caregivers have been lacking. We apply sequence and cluster analysis to newly available time diary data from the National Study of Caregiving, and analyze links between family caregiving and three types of emotional wellbeing: diary-based emotions experienced over the day, global evaluations of emotional difficulty, and a burden scale. We find that dementia caregivers provide more personal care and visiting and less transportation than other caregivers, but at similar intensity levels (~2½ hours on average). Experienced wellbeing is lower for dementia caregivers once group differences are controlled and emotional difficulty is more prevalent and burden higher for dementia caregivers before and after adjusting for confounders, but care-related time use differences do not account for these gaps.