AI Article Synopsis
- Informal dementia caregivers face significant mental, physical, and financial challenges due to their caregiving roles, often relying on online communities for peer support and resource sharing.
- This study aimed to explore the perceptions and usage of online peer support among these caregivers, using a survey informed by the Andersen and Newman Framework of Health Services Utilization.
- The survey collected data on caregivers' characteristics, their beliefs about online support, access barriers, and immediate needs, and was distributed through the Alzheimer's Association's platforms.
Article Abstract
Background: Informal dementia caregivers are those who care for a person living with dementia and do not receive payment (eg, family members, friends, or other unpaid caregivers). These informal caregivers are subject to substantial mental, physical, and financial burdens. Online communities enable these caregivers to exchange caregiving strategies and communicate experiences with other caregivers whom they generally do not know in real life. Research has demonstrated the benefits of peer support in online communities, but this research is limited, focusing merely on caregivers who are already online community users.
Objective: We aimed to investigate the perceptions and utilization of online peer support through a survey.
Methods: Following the Andersen and Newman Framework of Health Services Utilization and using REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture), we designed and administered a survey to investigate the perceptions and utilization of online peer support among informal dementia caregivers. Specifically, we collected types of information that influence whether an informal dementia caregiver accesses online peer support: predisposing factors, which refer to the sociocultural characteristics of caregivers, relationships between caregivers and people living with dementia, and belief in the value of online peer support; enabling factors, which refer to the logistic aspects of accessing online peer support (eg, eHealth literacy and access to high-speed internet); and need factors, which are the most immediate causes of seeking online peer support. We also collected data on caregivers' experiences with accessing online communities. We distributed the survey link on November 14, 2022, within two online locations: the Alzheimer's Association website (as an advertisement) and ALZConnected (an online community organized by the Alzheimer's Association). We collected all responses on February 23, 2023, and conducted a regression analysis to identifyn factors that were associated with accessing online peer support.
Results: We collected responses from 172 dementia caregivers. Of these participants, 140 (81.4%) completed the entire survey. These caregivers were aged 19 to 87 (mean 54, SD 13.5) years, and a majority were female (123/140, 87.9%) and White (126/140, 90%). Our findings show that the behavior of accessing any online community was significantly associated with participants' belief in the value of online peer support (P=.006). Moreover, of the 40 non-online community caregivers, 33 (83%) had a belief score above 24-the score that was assigned when a neutral option was selected for each belief question. The most common reasons for not accessing any online community were having no time to do so (14/140, 10%) and having insufficient online information-searching skills (9/140, 6.4%).
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that online peer support is valuable, but practical strategies are needed to assist informal dementia caregivers who have limited time or online information-searching skills.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11185190 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/55169 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Co-design of "Baatcheet," a peer-supported, web-based storytelling intervention for young people with common mental health problems in India.
Glob Ment Health (Camb)
December 2024
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
Background: Engaging with personal mental health stories has the potential to help people with mental health difficulties by normalizing distressing experiences, imparting coping strategies and building hope. However, evidence-based mental health storytelling platforms are scarce, especially for young people in low-resource settings.
Objective: This paper presents an account of the co-design of 'Baatcheet' ('conversation' in Hindi), a peer-supported, web-based storytelling intervention aimed at 16-24-year-olds with depression and anxiety in New Delhi, India.
Multiple physiological changes occur during the menstrual cycle; many are attributed to fluctuations in estrogen, luteinizing hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, and progesterone. These hormones differentially affect the menstrual cycle's follicular, ovulation, and luteal phases. Skin is one of the organs affected by changes in a woman's menstrual cycle.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic: identifying hesitant groups and exploring reasons for vaccination hesitancy, from adolescence to late adulthood.
Front Public Health
December 2024
Department of Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
Introduction: The COVID-19 (COronaVIrus Disease-2019) pandemic highlighted the importance of assessing the rationales behind vaccine hesitancy for the containment of pandemics. In this nationwide study, representative of the Luxembourgish population, we identified hesitant groups from adolescence to late adulthood and explored motivations both for and against vaccination.
Methods: We combined data collected via online surveys for the CON-VINCE (COvid-19 National survey for assessing VIral spread by Non-affected CarriErs) study, 1865 respondents aged 18-84, and for the YAC (Young people And Covid-19) study, 3740 respondents aged 12-29.
What Are the Barriers, Facilitators and Interventions Targeting Help-Seeking Behaviours for Common Mental Health Problems in Adolescents? A Systematic Review.
Focus (Am Psychiatr Publ)
January 2025
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, Children's Hospital Dr. Roberto del Río, Santiago, Chile (Velasco); Public Health School, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile (Cruz); División of Psychiatry, University College London, London, UK (Billings, Rowe); Camden and Islington Mental Health Foundation Trust, London, UK (Jimenez).
Background: Increasing rates of mental health problems among adolescents are of concern. Teens who are most in need of mental health attention are reluctant to seek help. A better understanding of the help-seeking in this population is needed to overcome this gap.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImproving Generalizability of Drug-Target Binding Prediction by Pre-trained Multi-view Molecular Representations.
Bioinformatics
January 2025
School of Information Science and Technology, Institute of Computational Biology, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, 130117, Jilin China.
Motivation: Most drugs start on their journey inside the body by binding the right target proteins. This is the reason that numerous efforts have been devoted to predicting the drug-target binding during drug development. However, the inherent diversity among molecular properties, coupled with limited training data availability, poses challenges to the accuracy and generalizability of these methods beyond their training domain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!