CMU professor receives federal funds to study cultural, religious differences in family caregiving

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This article was published 15/08/2024 (426 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2018, more than 375,000 Manitobans spent 230 million hours looking after ill or aging family members — care worth $3.9 billion.

That same year, about one in four Canadians, or 7.8 million people, provided care to a family member or friend with a long-term health condition, a physical or mental disability or problems related to aging.

Those figures, the most recently available, come from Statistics Canada General Social Survey on Caregiving and Care. And over the next five years, they will form the background to new research by Canadian Mennonite University Prof. Heather Campbell-Enns.

Campbell-Enns, who teaches psychology at CMU, has received a Canada Research Chair grant of $600,000 over five years to study the needs of people from different cultural and religious groups who care for aging family members, especially those with dementia.

Titled Families and Aging: Cultural Approaches to Intergenerational Dementia Care, her research will explore the ways different cultural, ethnic and religious groups look after aging family members outside of the health-care system.

“The goal is to research the needs and gaps and develop interventions,” she said, noting her goal is to find out who is bearing the largest burden of care, how they do it, the needs they have, how they feel about it, how the health-care system can support them, and their worries for the future.

She will look for answers to those questions through focus groups and interviews with caregivers. “I want to know what support they need, what practical outcomes can assist them,” she said.

The many hours of unpaid care provided by family members takes an enormous financial burden off of the health-care system, she said, adding “the system would crumble” without that help.

Although governments count on families to provide care, they “don’t have a lot of resources that go to families when they start struggling,” she said.

Caregiving also falls disproportionately on women and impacts relationships within families when adult children assume administrative and health-care roles for their parents.

And things can become even more complicated when there are pre-existing relationship difficulties within the family, Campbell-Enns said.

Her research will examine the spiritual and religious dimensions of family caregiving, including how places of worship might be able to help.

“I will want to find out what is out there now, and what other things could be done,” she said.

Campbell-Enns lives in an intergenerational household with her spouse, two adult children and her mother.

“It brings my personal and professional lives together,” she said, adding that her father, who also lived with them, died last October.

The award is part of a $94.5-million investment by the Canadian government to scholars in the fields of the social sciences, humanities, health sciences, engineering and natural sciences.

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