Resilience in the Context of Informal Caregiving: A Scoping Study

To examine the state of the science surrounding the concept of resilience as used in the context of informal caregiving. This study was designed as a scoping study consisting of a five stage process to investigate the extent, range and nature of research activity related to resilience and informal caregiving. Data consisted of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature. One database (PubMed) was determined to be most relevant to this study. Search terms included “family caregiver and resilience” or “informal caregiver and resilience.” The date of publication was restricted from January 2003 to May 2014. Forty articles were included in the analysis. The analytic technique included developing a codebook, coding all articles using 13 categories of interest, and compiling descriptive characteristics attributed to the concept of resilience. Content and thematic analytic techniques were used. The initial search yielded 178 citations, of which 137 were read by multiple team members. The final data set included 40 articles that reported 41 studies. Twenty-two studies applied quantitative approaches, 5 were purely qualitative work, 7 used a mixed methods approach and 7 were reviews. Resilience was found to be a concept relevant to multiple disciplinary perspectives and interdisciplinary co-authorship was prevalent in the literature. Typically, the context of caregiving was framed by health conditions that impact the care recipient’s capability to perform the activities associated with daily living. Spousal caregivers were the most dominant relationship studied, followed by parental relationship. Age of caregivers care recipients varied widely. Studies conceptualized resilience in various ways, with 19 using theoretical or conceptual framework to various degrees; only 12 reported the measures of resilience. Across studies, resilience emerged as a protective factor for the burdens of caregiving. This scoping study revealed that the concept of resilience may have important implications in understanding the complex trajectories of end-of-life caregiving.