Sibling Influences, Sibling Similarities, and Parent Care in Late Life.

Researchers have extensively examined why some particular adult children provide care to their aged parents, but rarely considered sibling similarities and influences in their examinations. Guided by social learning theory and diffusion of responsibility theory, we investigate whether sibling similarities are associated with adult children's care hours, net of the parent's and child's characteristics. Based on social comparison theory, we further examine whether such associations differ across adult children, depending on whether adult children share the same characteristics as their siblings.

Dimensions of Reproductive Attitudes and Knowledge Related to Unintended Childbearing Among U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults.

Measures of attitudes and knowledge predict reproductive behavior, such as unintended fertility among adolescents and young adults. However, there is little consensus as to the underlying dimensions these measures represent, how to compare findings across surveys using different measures, or how to interpret the concepts captured by existing measures. To guide future research on reproductive behavior, we propose an organizing framework for existing measures.

Early-Life Parent-Child Relationships and Adult Children's Support of Unpartnered Parents in Later Life.

Objectives: The proportion of older adults who are unpartnered has increased significantly over the past 25 years. Unpartnered older adults often rely on their adult children for support. Most previous studies have focused on proximal factors associated with adult children's support of their parents, while few have examined distal factors, such as parent-child relationships formed during childhood.

Intergenerational Transfer and Reporting Bias: An Application of the MIMIC Model.

Objectives: Parents' and adult children's reports of transfer do not always agree, because each has respective bias. This study demonstrates a method to separate reporting bias from transfer and identify their respective correlates.

Method: The analysis was based on 4,947 parent-child dyads from the Family Roster and Transfer Module added to the 2013 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Patterns of coping among family caregivers of frail older adults.

Past studies have extensively examined factors associated with coping strategies that caregivers use to ameliorate distress or solve problems. While these studies have found that stressors and individual resources influence choices of coping strategies, they have tended to overlook caregivers' social resources and have rarely considered the possibility that distinct groups of caregivers may use different sets of coping strategies. We conducted latent-class analyses to identify distinct groups of caregivers: those using no particular patterns of coping (unpatterned-coping), those centering on ameliorating distress (emotional-coping), and those focusing on both ameliorating distress and solving problems (hybrid-coping).

Activity limitations, use of assistive devices or personal help, and well-being: variation by education.

Objectives: This study examined the associations among self-care or mobility limitations, use of assistive devices or personal help, and well-being while giving special attention to 3 dimensions of well-being and older adults' educational attainment.

Method: The analysis was based on 4,456 community-dwelling older adults with self-care or mobility limitations who completed interviews in the first round of the National Health and Aging Trends Study. Path models were estimated to examine the associations among limitations, use of assistive devices or personal help, and 3 dimensions of well-being (positive affect, self-realization, and self-efficacy) for different educational groups of older adults.

Intergenerational Exchange and Expected Support Among the Young-Old.

The authors used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study ( = 5,023) to determine how 3 attributes of intergenerational exchange (content, direction, and recency) are associated with older adults' expected sick care and comfort from their adult children. They found more like-kind associations (expecting same types of support that had been exchanged before) than spillover associations (expecting different types of support than that had been exchanged before). Same patterns of like-kind associations were found for expected sick care and comfort, regardless of the direction and recency of exchange, but expected sick care and comfort had different patterns of spillover associations.

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE CAREGIVING EXPERIENCES: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE INTERSECTION OF GENDER AND RELATIOSHIPS.

Using data from the 2004 wave of the National Long-Term Care Survey, we examined how negative and positive caregiving experiences differ by caregivers' gender and relationship to care recipients. We further considered how their caregiving experiences are affected by caregivers' demographic characteristics, care recipients' problem behavior and dependency, caregivers' involvement, reciprocal help from care recipients, and social support available for caregivers. We found that female and adult-child caregivers, in general, reported having had more negative experiences than male and spouse caregivers, respectively.

Does informal care attenuate the cycle of ADL/IADL disability and depressive symptoms in late life?

Objective: Prior studies have extensively examined the reciprocal relation between disability and depressive symptoms in late life, but little is known about whether informal care attenuates the reciprocal relation over time. This study examined whether disability and depressive symptoms mobilize informal care and whether informal care, once mobilized, protects older adults against the progression of disability and depressive symptoms.

Methods: The analysis was based on 6,454 community-dwelling older adults who were interviewed in one or more waves of the Health and Retirement Study between 1998 and 2006.