Narratives of family caregiving: the process of making meaning

Researchers across disciplines have identified meaning as an important influence on family caregivers' responses to caregiving. This Paper describes a qualitative inquiry into the process of making meaning used by caregivers. This process includes three interrelated components: expectations, explanations, and strategies. Caregivers used this process to make sense of caregiving in the larger context of their lives, interpreting both the experience of caregiving and their own affective responses. Expectations included predictions for events or behaviors. Explanations incorporated both moral and practical reasoning to account for discrepancies between predicted and actual outcomes. Strategies, actions taken to actualize expectations, were influenced both by desired outcomes and by the presence of an underlying explanation for a given course of action. This paper provides some narrative examples of the process of making meaning to illustrate the components of making meaning and the interrelationships among them.