A Study of Related Factors of Burden of the Down Syndrome students’ Family Caregivers

The purpose of this research was to investigate the caregiver’s burden of the Down syndrome students and related factors including relationship between personal factor, caregiver’s burden, society support and caregiver’s life quality. The research was conducted with cross-sectional study; utilizing purposive-sampling to collect the background information of the 113 Down syndrome students from the special education school, follow by face-to-face interview with their caregivers. The survey was carried out by structured-questionnaires in four major sections such as background information, burden scale of the caregiver, scale of the society support, and living quality scale (SF-36). The results were coded and processed with SPSS 12.0 for data and statistical analysis using statistic analysis techniques of number distribution, percentage, t-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson's product-moment correlation and Stepwise regression analysis.
The conclusions were as followed:
1)The caregivers for the Down syndrome patients were mostly females, between the age of 41-50, with education background above high school level, and most of them were the mothers of the patient. The caregiver’s burden seemed not to be affected by their personal characteristics. On the other hand, most of the Down syndrome patients were males, between the age of 16-20, and educational background of high school. All of them have official registration of handicap. The caregiver’s burden was only related to the patient’s background education, but no other relevance.
2)With more support from the society, the lower burden would be for the caregivers. In addition, the less need of support from the society support, the less burden of the caregivers as well.
3)The higher scores for the living quality, the lower of the burden for the caregivers .
4)The factors that influenced the caregivers of the Down syndrome students were “care-giver’s need for society support” and “care-giver’s living quality”. These two factors can explain 24.1% of the total variance. Furthermore, the caregiver’s living quality was the strongest predicting factor.

The results of this research allowed the healthcare personnel to consider their case study with a more multi-directional consideration such as maintain a balance of relationship between the burden of caregivers for the chronic disease patient to their living quality and the society support. With those in mind can bring to the patient a better medical service and assistance so that during this period of recovery, they can living with quality and dignity.