Caregiver stress - Research Paper Example

The median age is 63 years and the mode is 76 years. The figure below shows the distribution of caregiver age in the sample. Patient Gender: Out of the valid sample of 348, 130 patients are male and 218 female. That is 37.4% of the sample is males and 62.6% females Caregiver Gender: Out of the valid sample of 348, 88 patients are male and 260 female. That is 25.3% of the sample is males and 74.7% females Ethnicity: White non-Hispanics are the largest group by ethnicity constituting 42.3% of the sample.

Hispanic ethnicity is the second largest group constituting 32.5% of the sample and the rest are African Americans constituting the remaining 25.3% of the sample. Caregiver Education The average caregiver education is 13.1 years. The range is 20 years from a minimum 3 years to a maximum of 20 years of education. Household Income For the household income, the dataset was not complete and data labels were not set for all ordinal values. Of all the data points, only 170 had disappoints for which the ordinal values were described in the data set.

For the available dataset details, the maximum frequency was observed for the 2000-2300 income group and greater than 2400 income group with a frequency of 31 data points each. Hypothesis test 1: Religious patients complain less about somatic illnesses In order to test this hypothesis, we can compare the means for total somatic illness complaints observed for the religious patients (any level of being religious – from somewhat religious to very religious) and for non-religious patents. The corresponding data in the sample would be the data for “Somatic Complaints Total” (SCT).

Out of the sample of 349, 5 cases are excluded in the analysis. Two of these are excluded because there is no data available and the remaining three because the data for their religiousness is not rightly captured in the database. It is captured as 2.56, which is not related to any ordinal assignment of data. The following table summarizes the mean SCT for different groups of patients based on their religiousness. We can see whether there is any difference in means of complaints by the different patients to ascertain whether religious people complain less or not.

This can be done using 2 statistical tests: the two-sample t-test and the one way Anova test. Two-sample t-test where we group all the religious people as one and “not at all religious” people as the second group to see whether not at all religious people complain more. Also, we can now consider two groups of samples, one including people who are not at all religious and second of people who are religious, somewhat religious, or very religious. The table for means for these groups is as below. =2) is people who are religious.

These notations are due to nature of data in the dataset. Now, we need to test whether the group of religious people complain less about somatic illness. Hypothesis testing by Two-sample t-test for independent variables Let µr denote the observed mean for religious group and µn denote the mean for not at all religious group. So, our Null hypothesis: µr < µn Alternative hypothesis: µr >= µnr The sig. value, which is the p-value for the test is 0.578. This is too high compared to a 0.05 or 0.

10 p-value which would have been for 95% confidence or 90% confidence level. So, we must reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis that religious people do NOT complain less abo