Effects of caregiving, gender, and race on the health, mutuality, and social supports of older couples.

Objectives: The purpose of this article is to report caregiving, gender, and race effects on the physical health, social supports, and mutuality of older couples.

Methods: The study involves cross-sectional results from a longitudinal study of 234 older couples, 118 in caregiving situations and 116 comparison couples. Spouses were interviewed in their homes.

Results: Spousal older caregivers are in poorer physical health than noncaregivers but have no greater numbers of social supports to help them in the caregiving role. Also, African Americans are in poorer physical health than Caucasians; yet, as caregivers, they have no greater numbers of social supports than Caucasian caregivers. Although females have more social supports than males, female caregivers have more negative feelings about their husbands than male caregivers have about their wives.

Discussion: Males and African Americans are in potentially more severe caregiving situations than their female and Caucasian counterparts. Results of this study are compared to Wallsten (1999), which found that African Americans and males had more favorable psychological indicators of stress. The two studies complement each other but open the question of response bias as a factor.