Relationship Between Caregiver Burden and Socioeconomic Status

In this study, caregiver burden measures the psychosocial strain a caregiver experiences as a result of caring for a person with autism. In addition, this study focuses on the effect of socioeconomic status on caregiver burden. A previous study found an association between lower primary caregiver education level and more sleep problems for children with autism3. Thus, the finding focuses on the child with autism as opposed to the caregiver burden. Other studies focus on elements that affect caregiver burden such as sleep quality, mental health, and cultural aspects. If it is known that socioeconomic status significantly affects caregiver burden, resources can be diverted to support those caregivers in an equitable manner. This is crucial due to the high value of services caregivers provide in the United States ($470 billion in 2013)1. Using scores from caregiver inventory forms from the Regional Integrated Special Needs Center in New Jersey and the zip codes retrieved from patient data, we were able to find median income from ZIP codes through census.gov. Then, using linear regression, we did not find a significant association between average total score from caregiver inventory forms and average median income. Interestingly, this may point to an overestimate of quality of life from caregivers in spite of low SES as seen in one study6. It may also be because of other confounding factors such as mental health, gender, and sleep quality on the caregivers. This study opens the door to more research to be done on socioeconomic status’ effects such as controlling for extraneous variables as well as using other methods to measure SES such as education level of caregivers.