Jingting Wang

and 9 more

Objectives: This study aimed to identify unobserved subgroups of parents of children with hematological malignancies with respect to caregiving ability and examine the associations of the latent class membership with individual characteristics. Methods: A total of 392 parents of children with hematological malignancies in China were surveyed with the Hematologic Malignancies’ Family Caregiver Skills Scale and a study-specific demographic information questionnaire. Latent class analysis(LCA) was applied to identify latent classes of parents based on caregiving ability measures. Multinomial logistic regression model was used to investigate the associations of socio-demographic and clinical characteristics with the latent class membership. Results: Results from the LCA suggested a 3-class solution: Class 1-“high caregiving ability” class(n=131, 33.4%), Class 2-“medium caregiving ability” class(n=170,43.4%), and Class 3-“low caregiving ability” class(n=91, 23.2%). Socio-demographic and clinical characteristics, such as having lower level of education, being married, having higher household income, more daily caregiving time, and having older children, as well as children not diagnosed with leukemia, had significantly larger odds of being classified in Class 1 than in Class 3. When comparing Class 2 with Class 3, the findings remained basically unchanged except that the effect of gender of parent became statistically significant, and the effect of diagnosis of children became insignificant. Conclusion: There existed three distinct priori unknown classes of parents of children with hematological malignancies in regard to caregiving ability. The class membership was significantly associated with parent’s socio-demographics and child’s clinical measures. These findings may be helpful in the development of personalized caregiving ability interventions.