Cultural differences

Objectives: Providing care for family members with Alzheimer's disease (AD) might awaken ambivalent feelings in caregivers. This topic, however, has received little research attention. Having reliable and valid scales is a first step in expanding our knowledge in this area, particularly among different cultural groups, as ambivalent emotions have been found to be dependent on culture.

Improving the quality of life of carers is the ultimate goal of carers’ policy and support services. This article discusses the issues and challenges in conceptualising and comparing carers’ quality of life in England and Japan, based on developing a Japanese version of the self-completion Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit for Carers (ASCOT-Carer). Since supporting carers in employment is a key concern in both countries, we particularly focus on this group of carers.

Objectives: The burden of informal caregivers might show itself in different ways in different cultures. Understanding these differences is important for developing culture-specific measures aimed at alleviating caregiver burden. Hitherto, no findings regarding such cultural differences between different European countries were available. In this paper, differences between English, Finnish and Greek informal caregivers of people with dementia are investigated.

This article draws on findings from a three-year project to develop and deliver culturally appropriate support group materials for South Asian and Eastern European family carers of relatives with dementia living in the UK. Analysis of interview and field note data revealed insights into how understandings of dementia in different cultural contexts can become operationalised through stigma processes and in turn influence the ways in which people with dementia and their family carers engage with formal and informal support.