This study aims to fully understand the caregiving experience of the husbands by signifying the meaning and essence of their experience of caring for their spouses with Alzheimer in an elderly couple household.
This study also intends to offer an unde...
This study aims to fully understand the caregiving experience of the husbands by signifying the meaning and essence of their experience of caring for their spouses with Alzheimer in an elderly couple household.
This study also intends to offer an understanding and to increase an interest in the husband caregivers who have been rarely treated in the study of social-welfare in Korea. This study is expected to provide a kind of useful foundation for developing an effective and distinct social service and policy which are based on the features of those caregivers’ experiences and needs.
“What is the husband caregivers’ experiences in their caring for the spouse with Alzheimer in Korea ?” is the main question of this research.
A plain but thorough investigation into the husbands’ caregiving experiences for the spouses with Alzheimer was considered to be primarily required for this new field because only a few researches have been done on this topic in Korea. I choose a post-positivistic and qualitative research method for this approach.
I have attempted to understand the essence and the meaning of human phenomena as they are in the social-cultural context by means of the phenomenological research method as well. In particular, I chose Giorgi’s phenomenological method, which is beneficial to derive the general structure of the subjects’ lived experiences for my study in order to describe husband caregivers’ words straightforward, transform them into disciplinary expression, analyze the expression in depth and, as a result, understand their experiences.
The subjects in this research were selected from the husbands who were caring for their wives with Alzheimer in a serious level and those who were able to lively communicate with this researcher as well as took part in community welfare service.
This research used the snowball sampling which has been mainly used in the case of a qualitative research. The data were collected for 6 months from November 2004 to April 2005. Five men have participated in the interview. I have mainly depended on the In-Depth Interview and partly on various personal records in order to fully understand the situations and contexts of the subjects. I have thoroughly collected the data from the subjects. For the purpose of sufficient data, each interview was proceeding from three to six times and it took one and a half to two hours per interview on the average.
Analysis on the date depended on Girogi’s suggestion of the four concrete steps for scientific phenomenology. At the first step of “ reading of the description for the sence of the whole,” I tried to grasp the general facts of the participants by reading their written statements several times. At the second step, I divided meaning units according to the points in which the transition of meanings happens with regard to the caregiving experience of the participants from the social welfare perspective. I have then transformed the given meaning units into the best disciplinary expressions of social welfare study at the third step. At the forth step, I combined the meaning units which were thought to be the essence of experience of all participants in common. Using imaginativ! e variation, I then derived twenty three sub-constituents and 8 constituents from those meaning units which were described by a disciplinary expressions. There was a little experiential variation among the subjects in each meaning unit.
The constituents and the sub-constituents as a result of analysis are:
〈negligence of the early stage of wife’s Alzheimer because of ignorance〉, 〈late discovery of the disease due to obvious declination in their wives’ ability in daily life〉, 〈repentance at the negligence of their wives: regret for the late treatment, anxiety about the aggravation of the disease with a bit of hope for recovery〉, 〈transition of the role from a husband to a caregiver: attempt to care for his wife without dependence upon the son and daugther, searching for the information of caregiving, careful management of his wife’s health, keeping house without difficulty and ignoring others’ eyes〉, 〈 experiencing both physical and mental crises because of troublesome behaviors: feeling restriction, experiencing physical affliction, repetition of anger and guilty feeling, disappointing of his children’s negligence, losing hope, thinking about a double suicide and considering hospitalizing in a sanatorium〉, 〈recovering the suffering through various resources: voluntary commitment based on compassion and love, strong responsibility, finding positive meanings through spirituality, learning of effective coping strateges of caregiving, gratitude for children’s helping hands and neighbors’ support, proper rest with the help of social welfare service〉, 〈adaptation oneself to caregiving〉, 〈change and growth versus the remaining crisis: obtaining self worth, change of the character and the value system, feeling of isolation from the society, anxiety about the future aggravation of disease and economical difficulty〉. I have found out a structure of the husbands’ caregiving experiences with the chronological descriptions of the dynamic relationship among the constituents. Then I have discussed the meaning of those experiences with regard to the social welfare.
As a result of this, I present the social welfare implications and suggestions as follows: In the theoretical aspect, this study tries to offer a full understanding of husbands’ caregiving experiences in an elderly couple household which has been rarely studied in korea. At the same time, it demonstrates the several experiential aspects which are distinct from the outcomes of the research in the western countries. From this result, this study provides the useful foundation data for the quantitative researches in the future.
In the methodological aspect, I use a phenomenological method because it is an efficient way to grasp subjects’ subjectivity. This method thus makes it possible to comprehend the unique meaning and value of the husbands’ caregiving experience in Korea. Particularly, transforming the experiential phenomena of caregiving husbands into the disciplinary expression with Giorgi’s phenomenological method, I made it easy to develop the academic discussion about the result of this research from the social-welfare perspective.
In the practical aspect, this study provides the useful resources and appropriate guidelines for social work intervention for each period of caregiving according to the process of alzheimer. This study also offers a kind of significant data in preparing social-welfare service and an alternative social policy which would be appropriate for the context of caregivers, such as, their family structure caregivers’ position in the family, their age, sex and the other social context and theirs. Another suggestion of this study for the practice of social welfare would be to find the caregiving husbands and to enhance the access to them who have been neglected while the number of the elderly couple household with Alzheimer is still growing up in Korea.
Finally, further researches are expected to treat the husbands’ caregivers who are living with son and daugther and being not benefited by community care service, and other various family caregivers’ distinct experiences from both qualitative and quantitative research.