Quality of informal care traditionally has been conceptualized as the extent to which care recipient needs for assistance are routinely satisfied in terms of basic (e.g., bathing, dressing) and instrumental (e.g., handling personal finances) activities of daily living (e.g., Morrow-Howell, Proctor & Dore, 1998; Morrow-Howell, Proctor, & Rozario, 2001; Skinner et al., 1999). When viewed this way, care ranges from inadequate (care recipient never receives help) to adequate (care recipient always receives help). Adequacy of care assessments are useful for identifying specific areas of deficiency where additional help might be provided. However, we believe that these measures ignore dimensions of quality of care that are critical to care recipient well-being. One such dimension is potentially harmful caregiver behavior -- actions by caregivers (e.g., screaming and yelling, threatening with nursing home placement, hitting, slapping, handling roughly) that may be detrimental to care recipient welfare without being severe enough to warrant social services or legal intervention. Potentially harmful behavior (PHB) does not necessarily preclude adequate care. For example, a caregiver may scream and yell, threaten with nursing home placement, or even hit or slap the care recipient but still provide adequate assistance with activities of daily living. Another dimension is “exemplary” care -- the extent to which caregivers consistently demonstrate sensitivity to psychological needs for respect and pleasurable activities (Dooley, Shaffer, Lance, & Williamson, 2007). For example, how frequently are care recipients included family gatherings and provided with the activities they particularly enjoy? Care can be adequate without being exemplary. That is, caregivers may meet care recipient basic needs but make no special efforts to consider care recipient feelings and wishes. These observations suggest that adequate care should be only modestly (if at all) related to either PHB or exemplary care. On the other hand, there should be some association between PHB and exemplary care such that caregivers who display high levels of exemplary care are unlikely to frequently behave in potentially harmful ways toward their care recipients. However, this association may not be a strong one. For example, frustrated and overburdened caregivers may display some aspects of PHB (e.g., screaming and yelling) while still affording aspects of exemplary care (e.g., including the care recipient in family gatherings, providing favorite foods). Moreover, caregivers who never exhibit PHB are likely to vary widely in the extent to which they make extra efforts to provide exemplary care. In sum, there are reasons to expect that PHB and exemplary care are related, but there also are reasons to suspect that the relation is substantially less than perfect. Thus, PHB, adequacy, and exemplary care are conceptually distinguishable. This idea is not totally theoretical. Rather, previous research (Dooley et al., 2007) has suggested that quality of informal care is multidimensional. Going a step further, the purpose of these analyses was to demonstrate that PHB, adequacy and exemplary care are empirically as well as conceptually distinguishable. Care recipients reported on the quality of care they received, and these data were used in our primary analyses. A secondary, but important, step toward showing that quality of informal care is multidimensional involves demonstrating that PHB, adequacy, and exemplary care are differentially related to caregiver psychosocial variables. For the purposes of nomological validation and additional tests of discriminant validity, we used data provided by caregivers relative to their own depression, cognitive status, recent stressful life events, and quality of their pre-illness relationship with the care recipient. We selected these four psychosocial variables because they have been shown in prior research to be related to PHB, exemplary care, or both. Depressed caregivers more frequently display PHB (Williamson, Shaffer, and FRILL, 2001) and less frequently provide exemplary care (Dooley et al., 2007). In addition, it appears that cognitively impaired caregivers engage in more PHB (e.g., Miller et al., 2006), but associations between caregiver cognitive status and exemplary care have yet to be determined. From the elder abuse and neglect literature, there is evidence that when caregivers experience more stressful life events, they are more likely to abuse and neglect care recipients (e.g., Godkin, Wolf, & Pillemer, 1989; Steinmetz, 1988; Wolf, 1988), but how life events are related to exemplary care is, as yet, unknown. Finally, caregivers with better pre-illness relationships with their care recipients display less PHB and more exemplary care (e.g., Beach et al., 2005; Dooley et al., 2007; Williamson et al., 2001). Notably scarce are data on how caregiver depression, cognitive status, recent stressful life events, and pre-illness relationship quality are related to adequacy of care.