Objectives: To determine the coping styles of family caregivers of patients with esophageal cancer and
examine the relationships between depression, coping styles and social support.
Methods: A descriptive and correlational survey was conducted in three university-affiliated oncology
and thoraco-cardiac surgery departments in Shiyan, China. A convenience sample of 301 Chinese family
caregivers of hospitalized patients with esophageal cancer were asked to respond to a set of four
questionnaires including: Socio-demographic questionnaire, Center for Epidemiological Studies
Depression, Brief COPE Inventory, and Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support.
Results: For the positive coping style, male caregivers used more problem-coping than female caregivers.
However, for negative coping, both male and female caregivers used maladaptive coping styles. There
were significant correlations between emotion-focused coping styles with adaptive coping, maladaptive
coping, depression and social support.
Conclusions: Family caregivers play a major role in caring for cancer patients and suffer from various
psycho-social problems. What is lacking in the literature was to address the cultural differences in cancer
caregiving burden, roles, and appropriate interventions to help them face the multiple demands of
caregiving. Therefore, a need to develop and evaluate interventions using randomized clinical trials and
sensitive instruments to measure the effectiveness of the intervention on patients' and caregivers'
outcomes.