As Korean society transitions toward a super-aged society, middle-aged adult children increasingly face compounded responsibilities related to paid work, child-rearing, and parental caregiving. While prior research has largely emphasized negative outc...
As Korean society transitions toward a super-aged society, middle-aged adult children increasingly face compounded responsibilities related to paid work, child-rearing, and parental caregiving. While prior research has largely emphasized negative outcomes such as caregiver burden and depression, this study adopted a strength-based perspective by focusing on positive caregiving outcomes and mechanisms. This study examined the association between caregiver identity and quality of care among middle-aged adult children caring for their older parents, and tested whether caregiving self-efficacy mediates this relationship. It further explored whether positive caregiving experiences moderate the mediating effect.
Participants were middle-aged adult children who served as primary caregivers for parents aged 65 or older. Validated and culturally adapted measures assessed caregiver identity, quality of care, caregiving self-efficacy, and positive caregiving experiences. Analyses included exploratory factor analysis, ordinary least squares regression, and mediation and moderated mediation models.
Findings indicated that caregiver identity among Korean middle-aged caregivers comprises four dimensions: loss of shared identity, entrapped identity, master identity, and normative identity, reflecting cultural values of filial piety and familism. Entrapped identity, followed by master and normative identities, was positively associated with appraised quality of care, whereas loss of shared identity was not significantly related to care quality after controlling for covariates. Caregiving self-efficacy partially mediated the relationships between entrapped, master, and normative identities and quality of care, with the strongest mediation effect observed for normative identity. No mediating effect was found for loss of shared identity. Positive caregiving experiences moderated the indirect effect through self-efficacy for master identity—such that the effect was stronger at higher levels of positive experience—and showed a marginal moderating effect for entrapped identity, but did not moderate the pathway for normative identity. These results suggest that the roles of self-efficacy and positive experiences differ across caregiver identity types.
This study contributes theoretically by validating caregiver identity constructs within the Korean cultural context and by elucidating distinct pathways linking identity to care quality. Policy implications include expanding caregiver support beyond financial assistance to interventions that enhance psychological resources and promote positive caregiving experiences. Practically, the findings support tailored interventions: programs that foster positive experiences for master-identity caregivers, self-efficacy enhancement and respite support for entrapped caregivers, and flexible caregiving approaches that respect normative values for normative-identity caregivers. By shifting from a burden-centered to a strength-based framework, this study provides evidence that cultivating positive caregiver identity and self-efficacy among middle-aged adult children can improve the quality of care.