Relationship Between Appraisals Of Strain And Of Gain And...

Introduction The study of Rapp and Chao (2000) aimed to understand the relationship between appraisals of strain and of gain and psychological wellbeing of family caregivers of dementia patients. The study addressed the gaps in the literature related to applying caregivers’ appraisals of strains and of gains to predict both negative and positive affect on caregivers’ wellbeing. Thus, Rapp and Chao (2000) proposed three hypotheses. First, the study hypothesized that the greater caregivers appraise their role strains, the higher negative affect (NA) they would experience on their psychological wellbeing and vise-versa. Second, the researchers predicted that the relationship between caregivers’ appraisals of strains and of gains and negative†¦show more content†¦The introduction of the study, however, does not explain some concepts well. From the title of the article, Rapp and Chao (2000) emphasize the scope of the study as caregivers’ psychological wellbeing. During the introduction of the article, there is no specific conceptualization of the term â€Å"psychological wellbeing†, except for a brief mention that there are positive affect and negative affect related to psychological wellbeing. Likewise, in the third hypothesis, the researchers express an interest in understanding objective stressors without providing a definition of objective stressors. The lack of main concept explanation may mislead readers’ understandings in the next sections. Design and methods In the method section, Rapp and Chao (2000) present participants and interview procedures, measurement, and statistical procedures. Notably, the researchers did not explicitly explain their study design. No information about the design and the duration of the research project was noted. Regarding participants and recruitment procedure, the article proposes that 65 primary caregivers were recruited from three community-dwellings. Among them, 27 caregivers were from a university-affiliated dementia clinic, 25 from a local Alzheimer’s association, and 13 from the community. The inclusion criteria show that family caregivers who provide daily living assistance or instruction to an older