Toward a cross-cultural perspective of family caregiving.

This article is partofa symposium that explores the issues involved in developing cross-culturally equivalent conceptualizations and measures for studying family caregiving. The examples used are from the instrument development phase of an ongoing program of research designed to generate and test a theory that explains the quality of family caregivingforfrail elders at home. This article provides the backgroundfor the symposium by introducing the symposium's unifying theme: cross-cultural equivalence. The process described is based on the experiences of the cross-cultural research team and Berry's model for developing cross-culturally equivalent research.