Savvy Caregiver Program (SCP) was developed to increase the knowledge and skills of caregivers of Alzheimer’s disease among African Americans. According to SCP, proper training is provided to the caregivers to enhance their skills and knowledge of home-based caregivers, and to boost their self-efficacy and confidence. Alzheimer’s disease is one of the major public health issues mostly found in the minority communities including the African American communities. According to the report, 5.7 million people in the USA are suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia disease. The African Americans are twice as likely to have this problem, that is the reason I have chosen this population for my study.
For the study at hand, we will use the caregiver competence and the management of meaning as the dependent variables. For measuring competence we will use a 4 items scale to ask questions from the caregiver about his or her competence. For the management of meanings, we will use the questions of the Savvy Caregiver Questionnaire, which was used to measure the situation utilization strategies to reduce expectations, searching for a larger sense of disease and positive comparisons. The sample questions are given below.
H1: How much do you think you are a good caregiver?
H2: How often you have tried to think about the present instead of the future.
Definitions:
Caregiver competence is defined as the self-assessment of an individual within the domain of caregiving to the patient, especially ranking his/her services to care for their patient.
The management of meanings refers to the positive thinking of the caregiver, and lower expectations from the patient and the caregiver have to focus on self-esteem.
For the study in hand, we will you behavioral observation, individualized rating scale, and client log/diary. The behavioral observation is one of the important assessment tools which can be used to collect data from the clients in which the behavior is most prevalent. The perceptions and the behavior of the caregivers are recorded through observation. It can provide more reliable results. The second method is the individualized rating scale, it also provides better outcomes, this method is widely used by the researchers to collect data, in the second stage, we will collect data through this method. The third method is client log/diary which refers to record different situations and conditions of a patient by the caregiver. This is also used by the researcher to collect data, we will use it in the stage of collecting data from the caregivers.
