family conflict

End-of-life caregiving is a highly stressful experience often fraught with conflict and tension. However, little is known about the ways family conflict manifests for informal caregivers of home hospice patients (IHCs). Framed by relational dialectics theory, the purpose of this study was to provide nurses and other health care professionals with an empirical understanding of how IHCs experience family conflict and tensions associated with caregiving. A second aim was to determine what strategies IHCs use to manage these family conflicts.

Older caregivers may be unfamiliar with guardianship, and may not know if it could help or hinder their caregiving. This article explores questions that professionals who are counseling older caregivers should ask, including whether guardianship is needed or if there is a less restrictive option; whether the caregiver should petition and what to expect of the court proceeding; whether the caregiver should take on the legal responsibility of serving as guardian; and what happens in case of family conflict, abuse by a guardian, or inability of a guardian to continue serving.

My research program considers family relationships across the life course: in early life, with a focus on disease prevention -- leveraging genetic risk information and relationships to motivate health-promoting behaviors -- and in later life, with a focus on informal caregiving -- identifying characteristics of those most vulnerable to, or resilient from, caregiver stress. It is fortuitous, if not tragic, then, that my research and personal worlds collided during my mother's final 8 months of life.

Objectives Family conflict has several adverse impacts on caregivers. Thus, there is significant value in determining the prevalence and predictors of family conflict, which can enable the health care provider to intervene if family conflict arises during end-of-life care. Accordingly, we aimed to explore the prevalence and predictors of conflict among the families of patients with advanced cancer who died in palliative care units.

Objective: Breast cancer diagnosis and treatment negatively affect quality of life for survivors and their family caregivers. The stress process model has been useful for describing the cascade of social and psychological experiences that culminate in degraded quality of life for both survivors and their family caregivers. This study is designed to test theoretically specified predictors of negative psychosocial outcomes in a dyadic context.