Dependent care, caregiver burden, and self-care agency of spouse caregivers.

A convenience sample of 113 spouse caregivers was used to examine the relationships between dependent care, caregiver burden, and self-care agency. Subjects were the spouses of radiation oncology or chemotherapy patients in a large metropolitan hospital. The Denyes Self-Care Agency Instrument was used to measure self-care agency. The Task Scale was used to operationalize dependent care, and the Burden Scales were used to measure caregiver burden. Demographic data were collected on the number of weeks in the caregiver role, presence of health problems in the caregiver, gender, age, income, and education. In the total sample, subjective burden was negatively and significantly related to self-care agency and objective burden, in addition, dependent care and objective burden were also negatively related. When the data were divided into subsamples based on gender, several of the relationships were in opposite directions. The most notable of these were the relationships between dependent care and self-care agency. It is evident that interventions should take these gender differences into account.