Chapter 5 Discussion
5.3 Limitation and Further Studies
Due to the restriction of resources, the sampling suffered from weak randomization procedure. Consequentially, there may be some bias in sampling. For instance, the officers of district home care center might recommend some organizations that they were familiar with. Hence, the generalization of the findings in this study should be very cautious. As a cross-sectional research, there might be deficiency that there was no base line for the dependent variables to compare with. Longitudinal design and usage of same instruments at different waves could be employed to collect more reliable data. This study did not test the causality so that the subjective well-being might be a predictor of time commitment other than the inverse situation. There might be recall bias for participants to recall the average time commitment to productive activities in the past one year.
Due to the poor internal consistency, subjective happiness was only included in the analyses conducted in employed caregivers other than the entire sample and voluntary caregivers. Hence, the comparison of subjective happiness became impossible.
Some more studies can focus on subjective happiness by utilizing other standard
instruments to explore the relationship between time commitment to productive activities and subjective happiness of older adults.
This study initially explored the relationship between time commitment to productive activities and participants’ subjective well-being and answers the question “what is the relationship”. Hence, some more subtle exploration of “why is there a relationship”
seems very attractive; thus, the factors that contribute to such relationship need to be explored and analyzed in depth in future studies.
This study suggested an appropriate time commitment to care-giving employment as 500 hours per annum and proposed two kinds of work loading design. Further studies can explore the design of work loading in depth to check whether there is different effect on caregivers’ well-being when the gross time commitment is controlled and the distribution of time commitment varies. This seems more practical and meaningful to real home care services practice.
Chapter 6 Conclusion
This research initially aimed at exploring the curvilinear relationship between time commitment to productive activities and young-old caregivers’ subjective well-being in Shanghai’s Home Care for Elderly setting. Productive activities specifically indicated paid care-giving employment and voluntary care-giving work while subjective well-being was measured by four dimensions: life satisfaction, subjective physical health status, subjective happiness, and depression. Annual time commitment was treated as independent variable whereas four dimensions of subjective well-being were treated as dependent variables. Furthermore, age, gender, marital status, and education were also involved as factors of dependent variables.
Polynomial regression and loess curve fitting were conducted to explore the curvilinear relationship between time commitment to productive activities and subjective well-being of young-old caregivers. The curvilinear relationship between time commitment to productive activities and subjective well-being was compared between young-old employed caregivers and young-old voluntary caregivers.
Multivariate linear regression and loess curve fitting were employed to explore a comprehensive understanding of time commitment to productive activities, productive role, age, gender, marital status, education, and subjective well-being of young-old caregivers.
The three curvilinear relationships between time commitment to productive activities
and life satisfaction, between time commitment to productive activities and subjective physical health status, and between time commitment to productive activities and depression were found by loess curve fitting method, as were demonstrated in Figure 6, and indicated that the engagement of productive activities demonstrates a negative effect on the young-old participants in the care-giving settings. Four curves, as were shown in Figure 9 were obtained by loess method to portray the curvilinear relationships between time commitment to care-giving employment and life satisfaction, between time commitment to care-giving employment and subjective physical health status, between time commitment to care-giving employment and subjective happiness, and between time commitment to care-giving employment and depression. A cubic curve indicating the relationship between time commitment to care-giving employment and life satisfaction and a quadratic curve indicating the relationship between time commitment to care-giving employment and subjective happiness were obtained by polynomial regression. The four loess fitting curves indicated consistently 500 hours per annum as an optimal time commitment to care-giving employment that demonstrated a best subjective well-being. As were shown in Figure 10, the curvilinear relationships between time commitment to voluntary care-giving work and subjective physical health status of young-old caregivers and between time commitment to voluntary care-giving work and depression of young-old caregivers were detected and portrayed by loess method.
These two curves demonstrated an approximate negative relationship between time commitment to voluntary care-giving work and subjective well-being in terms of
physically and psychologically. The relationships between time commitment and subjective well-being were compared between employed caregivers and voluntary caregivers. In the care-giving setting, young-old employed caregivers benefit much more than young–old voluntary caregivers in terms of physical and mental health when time commitment is controlled. Education was detected as a significant factor associating with life satisfaction within employed caregivers. There was a strong positive relationship between time commitment to care-giving employment and life satisfaction of employed caregivers with higher education when time commitment was within the interval of 250-500 hours per annum.
The above results and arguments were analyzed from the perspectives of activity theory and successful aging model. Concerning the results, the researcher suggests 500 hours per annum, equaling to 9-10 hours weekly, is an optimal amount of time commitment to employed care-giving work that maximums young-old adults’
subjective well-being. Furthermore, voluntary caregivers were suggested to be recruited as part-time caregivers so that their subjective well-being might increase.
Meanwhile, older adults with higher education level were also suggested to be recruited as part-time caregivers, performing 250-500 hours per annum so that they can benefit a higher life satisfaction. Some further suggestions were made to Home Care for Elderly organizations. Voluntary organizations were suggested to concern much more on their volunteers. More intervention is necessary to promote volunteers’ health in terms of physically and mentally. Meanwhile, this is also the
concern of social work practice to promote the young-old caregivers of Home Care for Elderly. The limitation was discussed and the further studies were argued and proposed.
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