Toward a cross-cultural understanding of family caregiving burden

This article is part of a symposium describing the development of cross-culturally relevant instruments to measure familism, caregiver burden, and quality of elder caregiving among Anglo- and Mexican American caregivers. This article explores issues involved in measuring caregiving burden. Caregiving burden is thought to adversely affect family caregiving, but the influence of culture on perceptions of burden has not been explored. Because no research focuses on caregiving burden among Mexican American caregivers, the first step involved reviewing the literature for cultural factors influencing caregiving and using the expertise of the cross-cultural team to identify and compare the meaning of caregiving burden in both groups. Next, two instrumentation studies were done to analyze the items on Poulshock and Deimling's Burden Instrument for comparable meaning and internal consistency within and between groups. The third step involved assessing the validity of Poulshock and Deimling's conceptualization of burden cross-culturally.