Cognitive Labor Challenges among Caregivers for Spouses Living with Dementia

• In Event: Aging and the Life Course Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 4: Family Caregiving

Abstract

Spousal caregiving for a person living with dementia is particularly stressful, though husbands generally report less stress than do wives. The inability of measures of ADLs and IADLs to account for this suggests that scholars be attuned to other forms of labor, including cognitive labor. Referring to the mental work that goes into family household management, research makes clear that the division of labor propels women to perform the majority of this less visible cognitive work; and that it produces stress. We thus examine cognitive labor performed by older adults who care for their spouses living with dementia. We ask two questions. First, to what extent does cognitive labor performed in caregiving present challenges? Because research on cognitive labor has focused on heterosexual divisions of labor, we also ask whether cognitive labor performance differs by gender and sexual orientation. Using in-depth interview data collected from 69 spousal caregivers (25 straight wives; 15 straight husbands; 16 lesbian wives; 12 gay husbands) we look at decision-making and planning, two dimensions of cognitive labor. Although we expected that there would be no differences in amount of cognitive labor performed given that spousal caregivers had to take on all household tasks, we found that straight men reported far less cognitive labor than the other three groups despite having to learn more daily household tasks. Further, straight and lesbian wives experienced more challenges with decision-making than the other two groups, though the reasons vary; the cognitive labor challenges that lesbian and gay spouses experienced reflected their feeling of the loss of partnership. We suggest some reasons for these findings, rooted in the different divisions of labor across straight and same-sex couples. Broader examination of cognitive labor dimensions offer promise for understanding sources of caregiving stress and possibilities for intervention.

Authors

• Toni Calasanti, Virginia Tech

• Sadie Snow, Hollins University