Exploring stress, coping, and decision-making considerations of Alzheimer's family caregivers

More than 15 million Americans are providing care for a family member with Alzheimer's disease. Family caregivers are faced with highly stressful experiences, using strong coping skills, and implementing critical decisions with little or no knowledge or information and with virtually no preparation or assistance. The need for research efforts to focus on caregiver stress, coping mechanisms, and informed decision-making skills spearheaded a theoretical framework to study the potential relationships between family caregivers' types of stress, coping skills, and their decision-making efforts. Constructs of life event stress, role strain, self-concept stress, and coping stress were examined relative to 10 priority areas of decision-making identified by the national Alzheimer's Association. A relational non-experimental research design was utilized. Caregivers completed four Likert-scale instruments with data analyzed using descriptive statistics and rank-order correlation procedures. Findings indicated varying levels of stress, strong family self-efficacy and high levels of coping skills contribute to critical decision-making.