Does caregiver well-being differ by rurality and state policy environment? Identifying a well-being typology for rural, suburban, and urban caregivers

Despite caregiving making up a considerable portion of how individuals and governments spend their time and money, its impacts on caregivers’ well-being are not well understood. In this article, we identify the various manifestations of caregiver well-being, test rural-suburban-urban differences, and explore the role of state-level family policy. Drawing on responses from 4,620 caregivers of adults and children to the STAT Caregiving surveys from the North Central and Northeast Regions of the United States, we use latent class analysis to develop a caregiver well-being typology. We identify three latent classes of caregiver well-being: high, medium, and low and describe the composition of each class. Next, we use multinomial logistic regression to test differences between rural, suburban, and urban caregivers in their probability to be in each well-being class, while accounting for individual-level characteristics and the state-level context of care infrastructure. We find that rural and suburban caregivers are overrepresented among the low and medium well-being classes and underrepresented among the high well-being class relative to their urban counterparts. Additionally, caregivers’ own characteristics vary more across well-being than does the state-level family policy context. Our findings speak to the importance of robust family care policies that are attuned to differences in social and built infrastructure across rural, suburban, and urban residence.