Hui-Lin Huang
Hualien County Guo-Feng Junior High School
Mu-Chuan Lin
Taiwan Mennonite New Dawn Good Work
Wan-Lan Chen
Department of Human Development and Psychology, Tzu Chi University
Family caregivers play a critical role in service delivery to people with disabilities. The demands of care-giving can take a toll on caregivers’ physical as well as psychological health, therefore it is important to provide effective services for family care givers to alleviate their stress. A one-group pretest-posttest design as well as follow-up interview were conducted to investigate the benefits of horticultural therapy on family caregivers. Fourteen family caregivers were recruited to participate a 3-weeks horticultural therapy course. At the end of the course, participants experienced significant decreases on both negative affect and the level of perceived stress.In contrast, their positive affect significantly increased. Many participants also continued horticultural activities at home after thecompletion of the course. These findings suggest that horticulture therapy benefit psychological well-being of family caregivers and that the benefit may sustain. Suggestions for future research and interventionwere also discussed.
Keywords：Family caregivers, Emotion, Horticultural therapy, Perceived stress