Work demands affected family caregivers' role strain and depressive symptoms. Working full-time and having more difficulty reconciling work and caregiving roles predicted role strain; work inflexibility predicted depressive symptoms. These results can help clinicians identify high-risk groups for role strain and depression. Nurses need to assess family caregivers for work flexibility when screening for high-risk groups and encourage them to reconcile working with family-care responsibilities to reduce role strain.
These results provide a knowledge base for understanding complex family caregiver phenomena and serve as a guide for developing interventions. Future studies with longitudinal follow-ups are suggested to explore actual causal relationships.
Assessing caregivers' self-perceived sense of balance may help to identify caregivers at high risk for role strain and depressive symptoms. Interventions to enhance caregivers' perceived sense of balance between competing needs may provide a strategy for reducing the negative effects of caregiving.
The Finding a Balance Scale, designed to measure the degree to which caregivers can balance the competing demands of caregiving and other priorities, assists health care providers in understanding the process of family caregiving. The aim of this study was to examine the scale's psychometric properties and determine an appropriate cutoff score for identifying caregivers at high risk for poor caregiving consequences. We found adequate reliabilities and appropriate validities in a convenience sample of 197 family caregivers of elders with dementia in Taiwan. The optimal cutoff was also determined. The validated Finding a Balance Scale provides an assessment tool to explore the competing responsibilities, conditions, and difficulties for family caregivers of elders with dementia in Taiwan.
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