value of informal care that women currently provide ranges in value from $148 to $188 billion, according to the Family Caregiver Alliance. Recently, Ongoing spoke with Chatters and Chadiha to learn more about their lives and their research. What motivated you to go into your research areas?
Ongoing:
What motivated me in particular was an interest in setting the record straight. When we [Chatters and husband Robert Joseph Taylor] were being trained, we were aware of a lot of research on African Americans in the area of family and family support as well as in the area of religious involvement. But it was typically based on small and nonrepresentative samples, often from economically and socially disadvantaged groups. These portrayals were not particularly helpful in terms of understanding the diversity within the African American population.
U-M Photo Services: Scott Galvin
Chatters:
Ongoing:
U-M Photo Services: Lin Jones
Linda Chatters
My family growing up in Los Angeles included a mother and a father, two sisters, and at various points in time, my father’s cousin came to live with us, my maternal grandmother lived with us, and a maternal uncle. The term used in academics would be “extended kin.” I was able to take advantage of national data sets looking at African Americans to get a broader assessment of how often and under what circumstances these types of arrangements existed within the African American population.
Chatters:
Ongoing:
Letha Chadiha
What was your family upbringing?
Did you use census data?
I did my dissertation research on the National Survey of Black Americans. And more recently, data is available from the National Survey of American Life, which includes African Americans, Caribbean Blacks, and White Americans.
Chatters:
How do you find your research has helped you in your own life?
Ongoing:
Chadiha: That is a difficult question for me to answer because my father died when I was ten years old and my mother died almost thirty years ago. However, I do think that my research with African American family caregivers has helped me help caregivers and elderly persons, but mainly caregivers, to validate their experiences. Chatters: It’s helped for me to see that within my family,
within the neighborhood in Los Angeles that I grew up in, there were a lot of different household compositions and family compositions and not to assume that the nuclear family is the only desirable form.
My father was disabled. He had polio as an adult. My mother worked at the post office. I was in a twoparent family in which the woman worked and the husband did not work. I saw that that kind of family works as well. Professor Chadiha, how did you get into your research area?
Ongoing:
My career has been inspired and stimulated by practice issues in gerontology and other people in the field, namely a colleague at Washington University, Dr. Nancy Morrow-Howell. She got me involved with the St. Louis Alzheimer’s Association and its outreach efforts to the inner-city Black community, which led to my first gerontology research study, and it was during this study that I realized there was inadequate information out there about African American caregivers. I got interested in the area of connecting caregivers to services.
Chadiha:
In another study, an intervention project with African American female caregivers of frail elders without Alzheimer’s disease, I used the narrative approach to help women in a focus group tell stories about their caregiving experiences. As a consequence of the women telling stories, they were able to see that they were not alone in their caregiving challenges. We used their stories to help them to problem-solve. Just hearing Letha talk about her work reminded me of kind of how I approach looking at large national data sets. It takes my reading someone else’s research to get ideas about where the relationships are in the data that I’m looking at. I’ll say, “Gee, I wonder who’s the primary caregiver? I wonder if there are secondary caregivers?” We did some early analysis of the support that older people report getting from their church networks.
Chatters:
What kind of support do people get from their church network?
Ongoing:
People just tend to say, “My church members do everything for me. They’re like family.” When we initially started looking at older people in church networks, we were finding that reports of receiving assistance tended to drop off as the person got older, and we wanted to know what was the nature of that. And we found that having an adult child seemed to make a difference. The adult child seemed to operate as a broker of services to the elderly person.
Chatters:
And let me just say, Letha, that I didn’t realize that our parental profiles were similar. My father died when I was thirteen. My mother died when I was in my thirties. We had a lot of older relatives live with us so that became, to me, normative.
Ongoing Summer/Fall 2008
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