Evaluating the Impact of a Goal Setting Intervention Program with Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, 2018-2020
Older grandparents (Generations United, 2015). Grandparents are very important in the lives of the grandchildren they are raising and influence them in many ways. Grandparents caring for their grandchildren also take on parental responsibilities and serve as role models to grandchildren when discussing matters of culture and issues pertinent to contemporary life (e.g., sexuality, violence in the schools, technology, and drug use). However, grandparents also report feeling isolated from age peers, feel judged by others as failures as parents, report shame linked to the perceived stigma of having to raise their grandchildren, and may lack skills to meet these challenges and maintain their own mental and physical health and well-being.
The goal of the proposed study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a socio-cognitive intervention to improve the health and social psychological outcomes for grandparents raising grandchildren using the theory of Selection, Optimization and Compensation (Freund & Baltes, 1998). The study will focus on the potential impact to improve the quality of the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, and it will refresh the grandparents’ communication skills and strategies to ask for help and to receive support as well as provide basic instruction in positive parenting practices.
This pilot intervention study will recruit at least 40 low income grandparents for the implementation training program which will entail of 4 to 6, two-hour sessions scheduled at a time/place convenient for the grandmothers as a whole. Half of them would be randomly assigned to intervention group, while the remaining half would be randomly assigned to a waiting list control condition. Each grandmother would complete a pre-and-posttest assessment interview with measures of caregiving satisfaction, anxiety, depression, well-being, caregiving strain, caregiver self-efficacy, and caregiving satisfaction, positive/negative affect (regarding her relationship to her grandchild), social support, and resilience. These measures are commonly used in the grandparent caregiving literature, and focus on both the positive and potential negative aspects of caregiving.