Caregiving in the US 2015: Downloads

This report is based primarily on quantitative online interviews with 1,248 caregivers ages 18 and older who provide care to an adult. Caregivers of adults are defined as those who provide unpaid care, as described in the following question:

•  At any time in the last 12 months, has anyone in your household provided unpaid care to a relative or friend 18 years or older to help them take care of themselves? This may include helping with personal needs or household chores. It might be managing a person’s finances, arranging for outside services, or visiting regularly to see how they are doing. This adult need not live with you.

Additionally, to estimate the national prevalence of caregiving for someone of any age, the study asked respondents if they had provided care to a child with special needs in the past year, as described in the following question:

• In the last 12 months, has anyone in your household provided unpaid care to any child under the age of 18 because of a medical, behavioral, or other condition or disability? This kind of unpaid care is more than the normal care required for a child of that age. This could include care for an ongoing medical condition, a serious short-term condition, emotional or behavioral problems, or developmental problems.

Only caregivers of adults were eligible to complete the full online interview. Results from the screening question about caring for a child with special needs were included in the prevalence estimates only.

Caregiving in the U.S. 2015 utilized GfK’s national, probability-based, online KnowledgePanel® in lieu of the traditional random digit dial landline-only telephone study used in prior waves (1997, 2004, and 2009). This change was necessitated by the ever-changing technological shift occurring in the United States away from landline ownership and toward cell phone use. A majority of adults in the United States now use only their cell phone (43%) or primarily use their cell phone (16.6%) for phone calls. 4 Due to the shift in data collection, Caregiving in the U.S. 2015 should be considered a stand-alone research effort, and should not be compared with prior waves conducted via landline telephone only (1997, 2004, or 2009).

The main figures in this report present results for all 1,248 base study caregivers, who completed a full online interview. A focused look at caregivers’ hours of care is shown in mini-tables to the right of each graphic. We define “higher-hour” caregivers as those who provide at least 21 hours of care each week, while “lower-hour” caregivers are those who provide 20 or fewer hours of care weekly.

All numbers have been weighted and rounded. In addition, “don’t know” or “refused” responses are not always presented in figures. For these reasons, data in some figures will not add to 100 percent. The results for questions with multiple response categories may sum to greater than 100 percent.

The n sizes shown in each table or graphic represent the unweighted number of respondents who answered each question.

To signal key differences between subgroup findings, the report uses an asterisk to highlight any numerical result that is significantly higher than the comparison group. When there are more than two columns or groups being compared, a superscript letter next to a numerical result indicates that it is significantly higher than the numerical result in the column designated by that letter.

All demographic information about the caregivers is in reference to their current situation if currently caregiving, or their situation at the time they last provided care if not a current caregiver.