Informal Care and Personality: Selection and Socialization Effects

Informal caregiving provides societally important healthcare functions but can take a toll on caregivers, with negative consequences for well-being. However, little is known about other psychological effects of informal caregiving and their specific temporal trajectories. Here, we focused on personality traits and examined selection (who becomes a caregiver?) and socialization effects (how do caregivers change over time?). We used longitudinal data from Dutch, German, and Australian representative panel studies (83,706 observations, 24,530 caregivers) to examine selection and socialization effects of caregivers’ Big Five personality traits. Respondents higher in openness were slightly more likely to take on the caregiving role. Over the transition to informal caregiving, we found no consistent evidence for within- person personality changes. However, with increasing time spent on informal caregiving, caregivers increased in neuroticism in two of the three studies and, on the item-level, tended to become less lazy, more considerate, and more worried. Overall, however, results provided more evidence of personality stability than change. We did not find robust moderation effects of gender and the caregiving context (care tasks, relationship with care recipient, and fulltime employment). We discuss theoretical implications for personality development and ways to advance research into psychological antecedents and consequences of informal caregiving.