African American and white mothers of adults with chronic disabilities: Caregiving burden and satisfaction

A model is developed and tested that explains the effects of race on the caregiving experience by patterning relationships between race and several causal agents. Data from 741 White and 100 African American women with adult children having chronic disabilities revealed that while the African American and White subsamples differed from one another in terms of age, education, income, living arrangements, physical health, caregiving burden, and caregiving satisfaction, race had no direct or indirect influence on either caregiving burden or caregiving satisfaction. Rather, variables representing the sociocultural, interpersonal, situational, temporal, and personal contexts which relate to race explained the observed variance in both caregiving burden and caregiving satisfaction.