Suchergebnisse

Drawing on a qualitative study of women who cared for their elderly mothers, this article explores women's experiences of feeling responsible for elderly relatives. The minimal provision of public services for old people and the relative absence of brothers and husbands from family caregiving emerge as material constraints shaping women's sense of obligation. This is affirmed by ideologies and assumptions about women's association with caring and family ties that permeate subjects' accounts of their situations. Translating their sense of obligation into their lives is a contradictory process characterized by ambivalence and guilt that stifle complaint. Further exploration of the social processes that sustain the inequitable division of caring labor can contribute to interpretations, practices, and policies that benefit rather than constrain women.

This article aims to augment collective understandings of the ethical complexities of qualitative research, and to encourage more attention to the actual practices of interviewing than has usually been paid in discussions in this area. Drawing on interview transcripts, we offer an analysis of the ways vulnerability may be produced for research participants by the intersection of interview factors (an interview strategy, the interviewer's presence, a line of questioning) with particular discursive and political surrounds. This conceptualization of the conditions of interviewee vulnerability prompts a revisioning of the power that researchers bring to, and exercise in, interviews. In reflecting on interactions with research participants we describe our efforts to use our power wittingly and responsibly.

With mounting fiscal constraints in home care, case managers find themselves increasingly confined in rationing roles and pressed into a narrow focus on the individual case. These pressures frustrate case management's potential to inform and contribute to more broadly-based improvements in service systems, policy formulation, and resource development. A study of home care users' perspectives in a jurisdiction where fiscal pressures have been rapidly increased reveals how rationing and service reduction affect service recipients and shape their relationships with case managers. The study sheds light on the challenges and opportunities for case managers of practicing in such straitened circumstances. Combined with their own detailed understanding of front-line service delivery, case managers can build on the knowledge of service users' perspectives to make critical contributions to both the well-being of the generally jeopardized populations who need home care and to the broadening of case management practice in keeping with its commitments to advocacy and systems level change.

This study of displaced home care workers reveals how managed competition serves to produce a flexible and atomized work force. Laid off when their nonprofit employer could not compete in the local home care market, workers blamed their employer and their union for their jeopardy. Obscured from local view was the role of government policy in offloading services to the market, benefiting privileged participants in the hospital, professional and market health care sectors. Workers' indignation at their own and their elderly clients' unfair treatment dissipated: they had to attend to the practical imperatives in their lives, and were unable to locate a target for their protest. Resolving to be flexible and self-sufficient in the future, they struggled to rework identities as committed carers. The study illuminates how particular organizational and political processes render services more meagre and labour more flexible, and suggests particular possibilities for both accommodating and disrupting those trends.