Lifestyle of Elderly and Caregiving Stress of their Family Caregivers

The present study attempts to assess the lifestyle of elders and the related stress of their caregivers due to caregiving. Lifestyle is a mixture of habits; conventional ways of doing things, reasoned actions and bundle of behaviors' that makes sense to the elders as well as their family caregivers. A purposive sample of 80 elderly and their one family caregivers (80) was selected from the Ranchi town, which was stratified on the basis of age, gender and socio- economic status (SES). Adopting a 2x2x2 factorial design data was collected using Lifestyle Questionnaire by Mathur, and Aurora, (2007) and Kingston Caregivers Stress Scale (KCSS) by Hopkings, and Kilik, (2012). It was found that lifestyle of the sample groups ranged from moderate to good category depending upon age, gender and SES. On the three dimensions of caregivers stress, the score was highest on stress related to financial issues, family issues and caregiving issues respectively. The male, young old and high SES elderly had a better lifestyle than the female, old old and low SES elders. Lifestyle of the elderly was found to be negatively correlated with caregiving stress indicating that better the lifestyle lesser would be the caregiving stress.