가족 돌봄 청소년의 돌봄 활동이 정서적 반응에 미치는 영향

Abstract

Caring for an old, ill or disabled family members has a significant physical and affective effect on the caregiver. Young carers who care these family members aged under 18 often care and provide support to family members or relatives without knowing what they really do. Very little is known about young carers in Korea generally and much less about their experiences of family care activities and affects. Despite growing interests in young carers, there is still no specific quantified data to estimate or calculate how many young carers there are. The aim of this thesis is to figure out the influential relation between the adolescent′s caring activities and their affects. The general survey that conducted by Ministry of Health and Welfare last year included the adolescent population in the survey, however, the focusing group was mainly the young adult carers aged between 19 and 34. Hence, this quantified study was to verify the impact of family care activities and care activities on adolescent affects by applying the British young carer diagnostic tool-MACA-YC18 and PANOC-YC20-to adolescents aged 13 to 18 living in Gwangju Metropolitan city. A total of 1,392 questionnaires were collected through the survey, and 108 of them, which were significant as young carers, were selected as the final analysis sample. Looking at the main characteristics of the variables, the proportion of female adolescent was higher than mail adolescents, and there was no significant difference in the ratio of low and high age group. More than half of the samples provided cared to at least two family members. There were only 15 cases of applying for formal or informal external support for family care and approximately 75% of adolescents were found to have never applied for related support due to lack of access to related information or complicated procedures to apply. In a country-by-country comparison of the level of care activities, it was confirmed that Korea had the highest level of sibling care and personal care. In order to verify the impact of care activities on adolescents′ affects, the variables of care activities were divided into six categories: domestic tasks, household management, financial/practical care, personal care, emotional care and sibling care. The adolescents′ affects were divided into 4 categories: self-esteem, depression, stress and burn-out. As a result of the verification, it was found that domestic tasks, household management and emotional care had a significant effect on self-esteem. For self-esteem, domestic tasks had a significant negative effect and household management and emotional care had significant positive effects. It was found that domestic tasks and emotional care had a significant effect on depression. For depression, domestic tasks had a significant positive effect and emotional care had significant negative effect. It was found that domestic tasks, personal care and emotional care had a significant effect on stress. For stress, domestic tasks and personal care had a significant positive effects and emotional care had significant negative effect. It was found that domestic tasks and sibling care had a significant effect on burn-out. For burn-out, domestic tasks had a significant strong positive effect and sibling care had significant negative effect. A hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to verify the moderating effect of significant care activities on adolescents’ affects, and it was found that age had a significant moderating effect on emotional care and self-esteem, domestic tasks and stress, personal care and stress, sibling care and burn-out. Through the results of this study, it was confirmed that self-esteem decreases and depression, stress and burn-out increase as domestic tasks increase. In addition, it was also confirmed that self-esteem increases and depression and stress decrease as emotional care increases. And the moderating effect was significantly verified that as age increases, self-esteem increases when emotional care increases, stress increases more when domestic tasks and personal care increase and burn-out decreases a lot when sibling care increases. In conclusion, family care activities have both negative and positive impacts on adolescents’ affects simultaneously. It should be noted that emotional care has a positive impact on their affects, which can be attributed to the respect for adults, filial duty and family-centered culture in Korea. That is, it suggests that young carers can secure the support base to raise into healthy members in community, if appropriate support is provided through early detection of young carers. In order to do that, young carers should be legally defined so that they can access various support policies and services based on their legal rights as caregivers. Also it is necessary to establish more efficient and direct support system by unifying the subject of policy implementation for young carers. The most important thing is the continued recognition of young carer issue in the community. This is because if they are treated with only sympathy and compassion, young carers could be still hidden, ignored and be excluded from the welfare service area by themselves eventually. Additionally, active intervention at school is necessary for detection and the role of school social workers needs to be strengthened as the person bound in duty to give the notification. The limitation of this study is that the survey participants are only about 1.5% of all adolescents in Gwangju Metropolitan city, so it is quite difficult to say that they cover all of them. And the Korea′s unique affects, such as attachment(Jeong) and filial duty(Hyo) were not properly reflected in the questionnaire by using of British diagnostic tools. This thesis suggests that it is necessary to develop a young carer diagnosis tool that reflects the limitations presented in this study to detect young carers who actually participate in family caring and provide active support in advance.