Answered Questions

This is an interesting topic that leans itself to the psychology and gerontology literature. I began with the Gerontology LibGuide at http://libguides.brenau.edu/gerontology. I selected the "articles" tab at the top of the page, to find the best places to look for research articles. I started by clicking on PsycARTICLES because it has a lot of full text. You may be asked to log in with your Brenau username and password.

After an hour and a half of searching various databases with limited results, I went to Google Scholar. It's harder to track down the full text, and you have to check each journal individually to be sure it's a peer reviewed or academic source, but there are some results when searching "sandwich generation" and stress and limiting the search to the last 10 years. Remember that you have to google the journal for each article you want to use to be sure it is a scholarly journal.

The big find on Google Scholar was the search term multiple caregiving roles, or multiple AND cargiving AND roles. The first version is a narrower search than the second because of the wording.

I went back to PsycINFO - also linked on the LibGuide - because it's easier to find the full text and verify that the journal is scholarly. Searching multiple AND caregiving AND roles, limiting to the last 10 years and full text, I found 41 results, several of which are relevant. Check out Perkins, E. A. (2010). The compound caregiver: A case study of multiple caregiving roles. Clinical Gerontologist: The Journal Of Aging And Mental Health, 33(3), 248-254. doi:10.1080/07317111003773619 and Bainbridge, H. J., Cregan, C., & Kulik, C. T. (2006). The effect of multiple roles on caregiver stress outcomes. Journal Of Applied Psychology, 91(2), 490-497. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.91.2.490.

If you don't have enough articles using this search in PsycINFO, see below...

The strategies in the paragraphs below were those I tried during an hour and a half of searching. They may be necessary to find enough articles, depending on your paper.

Next I tried PsycInfo, the grandaddy of psychology databases. Using the10 year and full text limiters with the same search, I got 5 results. The first, Lam, R. (2006). Contradictions between traditional Chinese values and the actual performance: A study of the caregiving roles of the modern sandwich generation in Hong Kong. Journal Of Comparative Family Studies, 37(2), 299-313. is pretty good unless you are focused on the U.S.

To increase my results to get more of an overview, I removed the full text limiter and got 25 results. This Removing the full text limiter serves a few functions. First, if you are working ahead and have a couple of weeks to gather your articles, request the ones you want by clicking on the Request Information Delivery link. We will look for the full text of the article for you. It can take up to two weeks, and we can't always get every article, but we have a great success rate. Second, it allows me to see how these articles are described and use that in my searching.

In the results list, below an article title is the reference information. Below that are the subjects of the article. Scanning the first page of results for the subjects I saw "intergenerational relations", "family relations", "elder care" and caregivers. These are the terms the database uses to describe the sandwich generation. I can use these as search terms, and combine them with words such as stress or "emotional stress".It is very difficult to narrow your results to the sandwiches since it's not a recognized term.

Searching PsycInfo, PsycARTICLES, Academic Search Complete, and Research Library, all linked on the Articles tab, will provide a few possible results from each database.

Good luck on this tough topic!