Caregiving is typically appraised as stressful by white caregivers, with adverse effects on perceived health and on mental health outcomes, with less clear effects on objective health measures and on intervening psycophysiological variables. In contrast, African-American caregivers typically appraise dementia caregiving as less stressful and have better mental health outcomes. A sociocultural modification of the stress and coping model of caregiver health and mental health outcomes is used to develop hypotheses about the effects of ethnicity as culture. The model leads to hypotheses concerning differences between African-Americans and whites in cultural values related to caregiving and in appraisal of caregiving as stressful. Preliminary evidence is presented for moderator effects of ethnicity on path models for health, mental health and cardiovascular reactivity outcomes. Positive coping strategies seem to have greater protective effects for African-American than for white caregivers, for whom the same strategies can lead to exacerbation of poor outcomes. The proposed study will use random sampling of households in selected neighborhoods to build a sample of 180 participants in a 2 (Ethnicity: African-Americans and white, non-Hispanics) X 2(Caregiver and non caregiver) design for multivariate analysis of variance testing of differences in mean levels of key variables. The moderator effect of ethnicity on path models of caregiver health, cardiovascular reactivity and emotional distress outcomes will be tested in a sample of 100 African-American and 100 white non Hispanic caregivers. The results have important implications for theory, practice, and policy with ethnically diverse caregivers.
