A Pilot Study of Family Stigma in Alzheimer’s Disease: Slovenian Perspective
Jure Bele *
Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Since the population of patients with AD is growing and the disease is affecting more and more people, the main goal of this paper was to investigate the process of stigmatisation of family caregivers, when a family member is facing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The research consists of two parts. Since only a limited number of research and case study reports can be found in the literature, even though the stigma in the context of AD is widely assumed to exist in societies, first the bibliometric analysis was performed. In the second part the empirical research was conducted. Four hypotheses were tested. A pilot random sample consisting of 22 caregivers of family members – patients with AD, was formed. The standardised questionnaire (Werner et al. [1]) was used. Multidimensional variables of cognitive attributes, emotional reactions, caregivers’ stigma, lay persons’ stigma and structural stigma, were formed using exploratory factor analysis, based on KMO statistics and Bartlett test of Sphericity, with principal component analysis and Varimax rotation. Cronbach’s Alphas were used to test the reliability of measurement scales. To test hypotheses, correlations analysis was used (Pearson correlation), at 5% significance level. Four factors for cognitive attributes, five factors for emotional reactions, two factors for caregivers’ stigma, single factor for lay persons’ stigma and four factors for structural stigma were formed.Statistically significant correlations were identified. Bibliometric analysis showed that the research topic of Alzheimer’s disease and caregivers’ variety of problems is an important topic worth researching. The factor analysis and correlation analysis revealed that there are several statistically significant correlations between the multidimensional factors of cognitive attributes, emotional reactions and the three aspects of stigma (caregiver stigma, lay persons’ stigma, structural stigma). The limitations as well as possible continuation of the research are also presented.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, caregiver, stress, family stigmatization, Slovenia, caregivers’ stigma, lay persons’ stigma, structural stigma.