Study On Family Caregivers’ Social Support To Disabled Elderly

The elderly is a vulnerable group, they need external protection, even those disabled elderly people, who suffered from not only physical diseases, but mental diseases, they need more comprehensive, detailed, long-term care. Chinese traditional culture," raising children for old age" concept, providing for the aged by family became major method in China, family members are responsible for caring work, but due to the family planning policy was introduced in the1980s, intrinsic family structure has been disintegrated, Chinese family structure gradually become to "421" structure, that is to say, two young men raised four elderly people and a child, change of Chinese family structure urged the number of people who can care elderly people reduced significantly, problem of caring disabled elderly gradually being come into view of researchers, and certain results had been achieved, but the target of research is to elderly people, there is not so much study on caregivers, so there are no systematic theories and research at present.Social support that caregivers can get includes formal and informal social support, formal social support contains support of national policies and various community services, while informal social support contained family members, relatives, friends and neighbors’ help. Although there are many kinds of social support, their functions are all different. At present, family caregivers mainly got informal social support. This paper aimed at family caregivers at5communities in Yanji city and investigated caregivers’ demographic characteristics, current situation and what social support they have gotten. Then this paper analyzed difficulties of family caregivers, and need of social support, some suggestions like based on caregivers effect, the collaboration of government’s lead and communities’ guidance, and non-profit organizations, colleges, families and whole society members participated together for giving caregivers money, human resource, material resources has been proposed, which play important role for handling with aging population.