Statistics show that 53 million U.S. adults are informal (family) caregivers, which accounts for more than 20% of the total U.S. adult population.��
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“This unpaid population of informal caregivers saved the United States alone around $873 billion in healthcare,” said Elizabeth Yuniwo ’27, a psychology major from Cameroon.

Discovering a problem

Yuniwo and Meral Moawad ’26, a psychology and social work double major from Egypt, have become quite familiar with these statistics this summer during their research project. They also have come face-to-face with the realistic impacts on those providing the care.

According to various reports and studies, 36% of informal caregivers report high emotional stress, 17% physical strain, 21% feeling lonely, and 18% financial strain.��
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“This makes sense actually,” said Yuniwo. “When you give a lot of your time to taking care of someone, you tend to have less time to take care of yourself.”

Digging deeper

As Yuniwo, Moawad, and the research team they were part of dove deeper into this, they discovered there’s a lot of focus on the care recipient, yet not much on the caregiver. So, this summer, the pair worked with Professors Julie Yonker and Toluwani Adekunle on a research project focused on providing support for the informal caregiver.��
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“Yes, the patient is the center, but there are also other people around that patient that you need to acknowledge,” said Moawad. “The informal and professional caregiver are a team to take care of that patient. So, acknowledging the caregiver’s presence is a major factor.”��
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Yuniwo and Moawad spent the past several weeks researching three main topics: the resources and support currently available for informal caregivers, the resources and support made available through professional caregivers to informal caregivers, and the resources and support made available through faith communities. ��
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The team performed both qualitative and quantitative research, including performing interviews with informal and professional caregivers and deploying surveys targeting both informal and professional caregivers as well as faith communities and a control group.��

Setting goals and learning lessons

The goal of their research is two-fold.��
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“Our goal is to create some sort of website or resource base that encapsulates or groups all of these resources we found, so we can make it easier for informal caregivers to receive the support they need,” said Moawad. “And then for professional caregivers and faith communities, we want to create some sort of intervention or training that will provide the skills to better assist informal caregivers.”��

While the team is excited that their research is contributing to an important yet often overlooked problem—they are also grateful for the lessons they’ve learned along the way.��
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“I’ll take away how I see people and how I interact with them. I think I developed more empathy towards all types of people,” said Moawad.��
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“I think I’ll be more attentive to things happening in society, to see silent needs, like the invisible caregiver,” said Yuniwo. “I think I’ll also be more empathetic and more compassionate toward people who bring care, because we are all called to serve and live out that Christian agency.”��
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Moving forward, the research team’s bigger vision is to develop caregiver modules for healthcare settings and faith communities, to partner with community organizations to distribute resources, and to present their findings to policy, health, and faith-based stakeholders.��
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This project is one of seven funded through the McGregor Undergraduate Research Fellows program at Calvin, which each summer opens up research opportunities for students outside STEM.��