Exploring caregiving experiences: caregiver coping and making sense of illness.

Objectives: The current research explores how family caregivers (1) make sense of caregiving and (2) cope with their circumstance.

Method: We analysed semistructured interviews of 13 caregivers of people with either stroke (n = 5) or dementia (n = 8) and used photographs that caregivers took exemplifying their caregiving experiences to elicit their description of how they made sense of caregiving. This enabled greater insight into caregivers' perspective of caregiving complementing our use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to analyse verbatim transcripts.