Intergenerational perspectives on impaired elders' support networks

The purpose of this paper was to compare impaired elders' and their adult children's reports of the elders' caregiving and decision-making support networks. The two generations (n = 101 each) generally agreed on the primary person in each network and on the overall hierarchy of sources of support, but they differed on the two networks' size, specific composition, and members' relative centrality. Decision-making networks were consistently smaller, more highly centralized, and more restricted to immediate family, suggesting the need to distinguish this network from the general caregiving network. Our discussion focuses on possible explanations for intergenerational differences in perspectives on elders' social support and on the desirability of taking these differences into account in both research and practice.