Primary Submission Category: Race/Ethnicity
Race/Ethnicity, Caregiving and the Mental and Physical Health of US Women
Authors:Â Andrea Goodwin
Presenting Author: Andrea Goodwin*
There are varied responses to the stressors people experience due to the challenges of caregiving. And previous research has shown that race is associated with health consequences of stress, in which stress manifests physically in individuals of color and mentally in White individuals. Women account for 60-70 percent of the 48 million Americans providing unpaid care to an adult with health or functional needs, and they are at two times greater risk than men to experience high caregiver burden. Thus, I focus on women to assess if there are disparities in health among US caregivers in different racial/ethnic groups. With consideration for the extent these disparities are affected by caregivers’ sociodemographic characteristics, this cross-sectional study examines if racial/ethnic disparities are patterned differently for mental and physical health.
My sample includes women ages 25-74 from the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC). NSOC is a study of family and other unpaid caregivers to participants in the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), a nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries ages 65 or older. My sample of 3,635 women from three pooled NSOC rounds is classified into four ethno-racial groups: non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black/African American (AA), Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Other. Physical health is assessed with a self-rated measure consisting of a 5-point scale, and mental health is measured using a combination of two questions assessing depressive mood indicators from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-2) and two questions assessing anxiety indicators from the General Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire (GAD-2). I use linear regression models that are adjusted to account for confounding and mediating factors. Preliminary findings are consistent with previous literature, as Black/AA caregiving women displayed the poorest physical health scores of all groups, and White caregiving women displayed the poorest mental health scores.