Parents Providing Care to Adult Sons and Daughters with HIV/AIDS in Thailand

This bound publication from UNAIDS' "Best Practice Collection" is a report of Saengtienchai and Knodel's qualitative analysis of the circumstances and consequences of parental caregiving to adult children with AIDS in Thailand. Their study is based on open-ended interviews, primarily with parents of adult children who died of AIDS. The results reveal the circumstances that lead to parental caregiving, the tasks involved and the strains they created, how parents coped with these strains, and the consequences for their emotional, social, and economic well-being. The results make clear that routine caregiving tasks to persons with AIDS often requires extensive time from the main caregiver. Caregiving assistance can be especially demanding at the last stage of illness when the AIDS-afflicted person often has the greatest need. Financial demands can also exhaust the adult child's and parents' economic resources. This reprint provides two appendices that describe data and methods and guidelines for interviewing. The study results are also available as a downloadable PSC Research Report (01-481), although the PSC working paper does not include the section on data and methods.