Caregiving Stress: The Cycle Of The ABC-X Model Analysis

Caregiving Stress: The Cycle of the ABC-X Model

Caregiving has been vastly increasing over the past several decades. Caregivers represent a diverse collection of individuals, in terms of age, gender, racial/ethnic backgrounds, and socioeconomic status (SES) whom share similar, yet unique experiences. In 2015, the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and the American Alliance of Retired Persons (AARP), published findings regarding unpaid, informal workers in the United States. It is estimated, 43.5 million (18.3%) caregivers are living in the United States. Of the 43.5 million, 34.4 million (14.3%) of Americans in 2014 provided informal, unpaid care to adults 50 and over (NAC and AARP Public Policy Institute, 2015). The study also found 60%

My mom is the primary caregiver for my elderly grandma, who has dementia. Personally, to be able to empathize more efficiently with my family it is important I gain understanding of caregiving elements. To connect to the ABC-X model, Caregivers, examines different coping mechanisms for adjustment and adaption given the unexpected development of Alzheimer’s disease. Ultimately, the pre-crisis is contributed to learning about the disease. From there, families had to pull together resources, including time, energy, financial, and social support. Acceptance or denial determined the family outlook of the stressor. The crises or the transition to caregiving roles caused a post-crises affect to occur. Where “stresses” family systems occurred, but were able to successfully adapt to the new situation. For my family, my mom never fully accepted the transition. Factors such as her poor relationship with my grandma contributed to her perception of resistance. In return, the post-crisis was

Overall, the articles exposed certain patterns linking the caregiving to relationship quality. Given the data, Quinn et al. (2009) used both ABC-X and Stress Process Models (SPM) to determine quality of the relationship and its impact on both individuals well-being influenced by caregiving. SPM outlines a four stage developmental process of caregiving adaption: contextual underlying causes of stress, caregiver stress, resources and mediators, and outcomes of caregiving (Quinn et al. 2009). The most significant is the context and “background” variables which describes the caregiver-patient relationship as an underlying factor as well as caregiver stressor. Even more, the SPM can be broken down into primary and secondary stressors, where feelings of relationship loss would be primary (Quinn et al., 2009). Family conflict or caregiver-patient relationship, on the other hand, would be considered a secondary stressor. Conclusions from the studies yielded pre-dementia relationship in relation to the ‘current’ status further impact the caregiver’s well-being. In the “current” relationship, the dementia patient’s needs for daily activities correlated with