ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Aging
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1608435
This article is part of the Research TopicCaregiver Burden in Alzheimer's and Other Chronic ConditionsView all 4 articles
Motivated to Care: Latent Classes of Informal Caregiver Motivation Moderate Stress, Resources, and Well-Being
Provisionally accepted
DEBORAH L Nichols1*
Amy Laine2- 1Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States
- 2Sandwych, LLC, Austin, Texas, United States
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Introduction. Informal caregiving motivations are central to how informal caregivers interpret stressors, access resources, and maintain well-being. However, motivation is rarely integrated into models of caregiver stress. This study applies the Informal Caregiving Integrative Model to identify distinct motivation profiles and test their role in moderating the impact of caregiving responsibilities and resources on caregiver distress and burnout. Methods. Using data from 1,026 U.S. informal caregivers, latent class analysis identified five motivational profiles: Duty-, Affectively-, Obligation-, Culturally-, and Situationally-Motivated. Path models tested how these classes moderated the associations among caregiving tasks, duration, psychological resources (resilience, social support), and well-being outcomes (acute emotional distress, chronic burnout). Models were run in Stata using standardized observed variables and interaction terms. Results. Motivation profiles significantly moderated associations among caregiving responsibilities, resources, and well-being. Duty-Motivated informal caregivers experienced reduced burnout with more hours but increased strain under intensive direct care tasks. Affectively-Motivated informal caregivers showed vulnerability to distress from time and task demands but benefitted from resilience. Obligation-Motivated informal caregivers consistently reported high distress and burnout. Culturally-Motivated informal caregivers experienced mixed effects where cultural alignment buffered burnout under some conditions but not distress. Situationally-Motivated informal caregivers, while generally less anchored in enduring motives, provided the baseline against which other profiles' stress–resource responses diverged. Resilience was broadly protective, while social support showed uneven and sometimes paradoxical associations. Discussion. Findings support informal caregiving motivation as a key contextual factor in informal caregivers' stress response. Tailored interventions addressing motivational profiles may better support informal caregiver well-being than one-size-fits-all approaches.
Keywords: informal caregiving motivations, informal caregiving responsibilities, informal caregiver well-being, resilience, social support, Informal Caregiving Integrative Model (ICIM), latent class analysis, path modeling
Received: 08 Apr 2025; Accepted: 19 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Nichols and Laine. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: DEBORAH L Nichols, deborahnichols@purdue.edu
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