Understudied Topics

In recent years, summaries of priorities for future caregiver research have been devised by multi-disciplinary forums. In 2018, The Family Caregiving Institute at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis brought together more than 50 thought leaders at the two-day Research Priorities in Caregiving Summit: Advancing Family-Centered Care across the Trajectory of Serious Illness to identify, define and map out research priorities to advance the caregiving field. See those priorities onlineopens in new window.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Families Caring for an Aging America (2016) also provides recommendations for future research, including improving implementation and evaluation of community-based interventions for caregivers of diverse conditions. The report is available onlineopens in new window.

Priorities in caregiving research that are particularly important for psychologists are:

1. The impact of caregiving on human development and family relationships over time.
2. The long-term impact of caregiving stress on health, especially biological outcomes and mortality.
3. The long-term effects of caregiving interventions on well-being, health and mortality of caregivers.
4. The long-term effects of caregiving interventions on well-being, health secondary complications and mortality, and nursing home placement among care recipients.
5. Development of measures that assess problems that are important to family caregivers and appropriate targets of change after caregiver intervention.
6. Understanding the mechanisms through which caregivers interventions may have beneficial effects on care recipients.
7. Culturally-sensitive interventions and the effects of acculturation on caregiving among individuals from various ethnic backgrounds.
8. Cost-benefit studies of caregiver interventions.
9. Interventions that reach the entire network of family caregivers, not just the primary caregiver.
10. Interventions to address the needs of long-distance caregivers.
11. The translation of evidence-based caregiving interventions into real-world care provision environments.
12. Special needs of caregivers from diverse cultural backgrounds and effective ways of addressing those needs via interventions and policies.
13. Special needs of caregivers for diverse diseases, disabilities, and populations, and effective ways of addressing those needs via interventions and policies.
14. Understanding the particular caregiver burdens in families with hereditary disease syndromes.
15. Differential caregiving burden on single parents versus partnered or married parents of ill children.
16. Understanding the differential impact of caregiving on fathers versus mothers of ill children.
17. Models for using naturally occurring resources to purposely support caregivers in the community (e.g., services within Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCS)
18. Designing, implementing, and evaluating technology to fulfill unmet caregiver needs (e.g., support caregiving tasks, promote safety of the care recipient, facilitate communication with others in the care network, provide options for education and skill-building, promote balance between personal and caregiving responsibilities, and alleviate burden)
19. Understanding and promoting conditions under which caregivers can experience mental and physical health benefits from caregiving
20. Understanding the effects of caregiving on sleep health and designing interventions to address sleep health in caregivers
21. Understanding mechanisms through which caregiving affects cognitive health
22. End of life and palliative caregiving for diverse conditions
23. Caregiving and employment
24. Young caregivers; strains and gains of caregiving as a child; access to supports and services, long- and short- term effects on development, educational attainment, interpersonal relationships, physical health, mental health, etc.