Concordance within Latino caregiving dyads on perceptions of social support and aging: A qualitative study

Research has found that Latino elders' sense of well-being and aging are influenced by the level of support they perceive to receive from their caregivers and social networks. However, we know little about the concordance of views within the Latino caregiving-care receiver dyad on social support and its contributions to healthy aging among Latino elders.

This study qualitatively examined the concordance between Latino caregivers and care receivers' perceptions of social support and aging. One-time semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine caregiver-care receiver dyads living in East Los Angeles. Caregivers and care-receiving elders were interviewed separately on the story of how they came to occupy their role in the dyad, and on their views about social support, health and aging. Audio files were transcribed and analyzed in the language of interview, primarily Spanish. Transcripts were repeatedly examined for thematic content. Two key themes have emerged thus far in our analysis.

First, we found agreement in the majority of dyads on the definitions of social support where caregivers and care receivers viewed social support as companionship, attention, and affection—all of which were believed to be important for healthy aging. Second, caregivers and care receivers shared similar meanings of growing old. Caregivers and care receivers viewed aging as process that occurs over a long time and that becoming old meant the inability to do things that were once do-able.

Additionally, most care receivers did not consider themselves to be old despite meeting the criteria of their own definitions on being old.