An experimental design will be used to compare the effectiveness of multi-family counseling with individual family counseling on the subjective well-being of chronically ill elderly who live with their adult children. The research design is a pretest-posttest control group experimental design with six data collection points over a three year period. The sample consists of 180 chronically ill elderly and their families. The sample will be divided into three groups: 60 families in the multi-family counseling group, 60 families in the individual family counseling group and 60 families in the control group. These family sessions (including the elderly family members) will focus on strengthening or changing family environment. The interventions will be directed at encouraging a constructive, supportive family capable of dealing with stress and crises. Changes in self esteem, perceptions of support, and physical impairment in the elderly member are expected outcomes of the family intervention. Analysis of data will be done through analysis of co-variance, path analysis, regression, t-tests, and other tests when appropriate.
| Dalal, Shalini; Bruera, Eduardo (2013) Access to opioid analgesics and pain relief for patients with cancer. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 10:108-16 |
