Emerging caregiver burden domains in the new National Study of Caregiving: Results, reliability, and applications

Nearly 50 million informal caregivers provide care for an aging adult. Despite benefits associated with caregiving, resultant caregiver stress can lead to negative physical and mental health consequences, or “caregiver burden”.  Until now, a comprehensive national dataset that profiles caregiver experiences did not exist.  The National Health and Aging Trends Study recently released Wave 1 of the first, nationally representative dataset on informal caregivers: the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC).  This database contains extensive information on 1014 informal caregivers about the caregiver experience.  To date, the reliability and validity of the caregiver burden questions in NSOC have not been assessed.  Therefore, the objectives of our study are to use exploratory factor analysis to obtain a set of latent factors among a subset of caregiver burden questions identified in previous studies and test the reliability of factors that emerged.  After multiple factor analyses, four consistent domains emerged: Social (7 questions), Negative Emotional (5 questions), Positive Emotional (5 questions), and Financial (2 questions); these factors explain 55.9% of the variability among the selected questions. Chronbach’s alpha for factors were 0.827, 0.775, 0.803, and 0.580, respectively.  Additional questions that did not load onto a factor at a correlation >0.55 were removed.  These findings highlight the level of reliability and validity in these caregiver burden domains.  These results in the context of the larger NSOC database will allow researchers to better understand caregiver burden in order to target interventions to protect caregiver health and maintain this vital component of the US health care system.