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Help‐seeking by older husbands caring for wives with dementia
Author(s) -
Brown Janet Witucki,
Chen Shuli,
Mitchell Carolyn,
Province Amy
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of advanced nursing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.948
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1365-2648
pISSN - 0309-2402
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2648.2007.04290.x
Subject(s) - dementia , grounded theory , situational ethics , psychology , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , psychological intervention , help seeking , perspective (graphical) , psychosocial , variety (cybernetics) , social psychology , developmental psychology , qualitative research , mental health , medicine , psychotherapist , psychiatry , disease , social science , pathology , artificial intelligence , sociology , computer science
Title. Help‐seeking by older husbands caring for wives with dementiaAim. This paper reports a study to gain understanding of the help‐seeking process of older husbands caring for wives with dementia. Background. Men comprise 41% of spousal caregivers. However, few reports describe older husbands’ caregiving experiences and none specifically explore help‐seeking in men caring for wives with dementia. Method. A grounded theory design was used to discover a theory of help‐seeking by older caregiver husbands. Audiotaped interviews were conducted during 2004 and 2005 with nine husband participants. The interviews were analysed by a research group to discover the core category and the relationships of related categories to develop a theory of help‐seeking that was grounded in the data. Margaret Newman's theory of Health as Expanding Conscious provided a theoretical perspective for interpretation of the findings. Findings. The core category, ‘Doing the best I can’, was preceded by the antecedent of ‘changing patterns’. Husbands made choices to use action/interaction strategies of ‘Relinquishing’, ‘Reaching out’ and ‘Shouldering’ which were influenced by a variety of internal, relational, situational, and experiential facilitating or hindering intervening conditions. The consequence of help‐seeking process was ‘Continuing on’, which had categories of: ‘Keeping at home’, ‘Staying together’, and ‘Taking care of myself’. Conclusion. Help‐seeking by older husband caregivers is complex and gender‐specific. Interventions to assist these caregivers must also be gender‐specific and complement already existing help‐seeking patterns. Focusing on helping caregivers to discover their patterns of relating and help‐seeking empowers them to find new ways of interacting and to discover possibilities for action.