Coping with family caregiving to persons with dementia: a critical review

Seventeen empirical studies that relate the ways of coping employed by family caregivers of persons affected by dementia to their health and morale are critically reviewed for the purposes of determining whether there is any consensus regarding ways of coping that serve health-protective functions, and whether the studies' designs and measurement strategies are faithful to the transactional theory of coping upon which they are founded. Due to the use of cross-sectional designs, the adoption of different coping and outcome measures, the lack of specificity and the incomparability of the target stressors, the reliance on retrospective reports, and the use of inappropriate response formats, among other limitations, the interpretability of the cumulative body of empirical findings on caregiver coping is questionable. Ways of strengthening and broadening coping research to make it more fruitful and theoretically coherent are presented.