Limitations of Present Study and Suggestions to Future Research
Although this study provides informative findings about the experiences
of caregiving gains and the effects of social support, and has the
432 Community Mental Health Journal
strength of a large, diverse sample of families, there are several limitations
of the study worth noting. First, we recognize that reliance on
self-report measures of caregiving gains may introduce some social
desirability response bias. Yet, as shown in Table 2, responses to most
of the items were distributed among the four response categories instead
of being clustered at the positive end, which suggests that the
effect of social desirability is relatively small for most of the items in the
scale.
Second, the cross-sectional, quantitative design of this study limits
the analysis on the development of the family member’s caregiving
gains. The current study has shown that the experiences of gains are
common among family caregivers. Additional longitudinal studies as
well as both quantitative and qualitative investigations are needed to
further explore the developmental process of caregiving gains, the
underlying transitions between these gains and the caregiver’s overall
well being, and the mechanisms embedded in the relationships between
the perceived social support and the experiences of gains.
Finally, the study sample is diverse in terms of respondents’ age,
education, household income, relationship to the relative with
mental illness, and support group participation. However, this group
is predominately from the European American cultures and thus
the generalizability of the findings to other cultural groups is unknown.
Research is needed to compare and contrast the effects of
different sources of support on caregiving gains in various cultural
contexts.