Convenience Samples and Caregiving Research: How Generalizable Are the Findings?

Abstract

Researchers should use convenience samples cautiously, as they may have limited generalizability.

Health-related quality of life of family caregivers—Evidence from Hesse

“…Often the method of the non-random recruited samples as used in this study are criticised resulting in higher amount of perceived burden (Sörensen et al 2002;Pruchno et al 2008), the reported values are comparable to a great number of findings within family caregiver investigations.…”

Caregivers as Therapeutic Agents in Dementia Care

“…Thus, there remains a gap between the research that has been generated and the needs of delivery systems and clinical decision makers. Furthermore, as interventions necessarily depend upon volunteers, study samples may be very different from the at-large population of families providing care (Pruchno et al, 2008). These critical issues would be important to address in future studies to maximize the clinical relevance and real-world dissemination potential of interventions.…”

The Lifelines Cohort Study: a data source available for studying informal caregivers’ experiences and the outcomes of informal caregiving

“…In addition, our caregiver study population contained a wide mixture of informal caregivers, with variation in, for example, types of informal care tasks, intensity of caregiving, care recipient's health problems, and caregiving experiences and outcomes. This wide variation enables the identification of common features across caregiving populations, which is not possible when focusing on specific and more homogeneous groups of informal caregivers [9,11].…”

“…As there can be large differences among informal caregivers, caregiving studies often focus on homogeneous diagnostic groups of care recipients (e.g., Alzheimer's disease, stroke, cancer) [9] and recruit informal caregivers via these selective groups of care recipients [10]. As a result, informal caregivers in these studies may experience relatively high levels of burden and low levels of positive experiences [11]. In addition, although these studies provide relevant and useful information for specific groups of informal caregivers and their care recipients, their approach also compromises the generalizability of the findings to the larger caregiving population, limits the identification of common features across caregiving populations, and potentially under-or overestimates the associations between variables [9,[11][12][13][14].…”