Suchergebnisse

Namibia's lengthy colonial history and current high levels of inequality foreshadow care in the context of poverty and marginalisation, and within families that are diverse and whose care capacities are poorly understood. Focus group interviews with family carers of older people in two marginalised communities provide insights into their experiences of care. We highlight three findings: first, contexts of care perpetuate and entrench marginalisation; second, care is not widely shared within families, raising questions of what it means to 'do family'; and, third, care has negative consequences for carers and their families, foreshadowing generational replication of carer exclusion.

ABSTRACTIn health and chronic illness, satisfying marriages promote wellbeing and life satisfaction, yet stroke research has focused on either the stroke survivor as the patient or the spouse as a care-giver. Using Pope, Mays and Popay's framework for synthesising qualitative and quantitative methods, we conducted a systematic review and synthesis of 39 peer-reviewed studies to determine what happens to marital relationships after one partner has suffered a stroke. All the articles examined the impact of stroke. Three overarching themes characterise the evolution of marriage after stroke: chaos in the marriage, work to re-establish the marriage and evolution of the marriages. While both the stroke condition itself and the survivors' need for care undermined the emotional qualities of the relationship for some couples, about two-thirds were able to retain or regain the relationship closeness. As in other chronic illnesses, the relationship closeness and a couple's ability to collaborate contributed to the survivor's recovery and to the satisfaction with life of the stroke survivor and the spouse. Our results underscore the need to consider the quality of, and the qualities of, the relationship between stroke survivors and their spouses. Future research could include a greater focus on qualitative or mixed-methods approaches to explore the interactions between stroke survivors and spouses that impact the wellbeing of both partners.

The power of social connections is a contemporary focus of research across world regions. Yet, evidence of challenges to carers' social relationships remains fragmented and underexplored. We conducted a scoping review of 66 articles to create a state-of-knowledge review of the social consequences of caring. Findings indicate evidence of consequences for relationships with care receivers, with other family members and with broader social networks. Knowledge gaps include changes in relationships across time and in understanding diversity in the types and extent of consequences. Evidence challenges assumptions related to caregiving families and to the sustainability of family care.

Le capital social a constitué un cadre important pour la conceptualisation de la place des liens sociaux dans la qualité de vie. La famille n'a pas fait partie des groupes d'intérêts dans les recherches sur le capital social. Néanmoins, dans le contexte de la recherche et de la politique publique sur le vieillissement, le discours contemporain sur les familles et sur les soins est congruent avec les hypothèses sur le capital social. Les auteurs s'inspirent de la documentation sur le capital social pour encadrer leur compréhension du capital social inhérent aux familles ayant des personnes âgées de santé fragile. Ils émettent l'hypothèse de leur capacité de bénéficier des soins des membres de la famille. Les données proviennent de l'Enquête sociale générale sur le vieillissement et le soutien social (ESG 2002) de Statistique Canada.Social capital has been a key framework in conceptualizing the place of social ties in quality of life. Families have not been among groups of interest in social capital research. Yet within the context of research and public policy on aging, the contemporary discourse on families and care is congruent with social capital assumptions. In this paper, we draw on social capital literature to frame our understanding of the social capital inherent in families of frail older adults, and hypothesize their abilities to benefit family members. Data are drawn from Statistics Canada 2002 General Social Survey on Aging and Social Support.

Siblings sharing responsibility for parent care, and entitlement to parent assets, are sometimes dissatisfied with how their parents' estates are distributed following a period of care to the parent. Such dissatisfaction can be advanced through legal claims by some siblings that other siblings, during the course of giving care, exerted undue influence over the parent to obtain their assets. The Canadian legal doctrine of undue influence directs attention to what transpired between two parties in the interest of protecting vulnerable people from having to honor arrangements to which they did not truly consent. In these cases, the focus is on the relationship between a sibling as an adult child, and the now deceased care recipient parent. At the same time, these cases reflect expectations and dynamics among siblings relative to each other. In this paper, a family, rather than dyadic, perspective is employed to illuminate elements of undue influence claims that are relevant to the sibling experience of giving care and sharing assets. We thus expand on understandings of dyadic issues addressed by the courts.

S'appuyant sur le système social de production et sur la théorie du capital social, les auteurs questionnent l'importance spécifique des ressources personnelles et environnementales sur la satisfaction, en utilisant le temps, la santé, la situation financière et les activités principales comme variables. Les données sur les Canadiens et les Canadiennes âgés de 60 ans et plus (n=5,986) ayant participéà l'Enquête sociale générale — engagement social (cycle 17) ont été analysées. Les personnes âgées canadiennes ont été très satisfaites de l'utilisation de leur temps, mais moins de leur situation financière. Alors que les limitations dues à la santé et le sentiment de maîtrise ont été importants dans les quatre domaines, l'environnement physique et les activités communautaires ont eu de plus en plus d'effets idiosyncrasiques et spécifiques aux domaines. Les auteurs analysent en outre la signification de leurs résultats en se servant de la documentation sur la résilience, de la spécificité fonctionnelle des relations sociales et de l'utilisation maximale des ressources.Drawing on social productive function and social capital theory, we examine the differential importance of personal and environmental resources to the satisfaction with time use, health, finances, and main activities. Data pertaining to Canadians aged 60 and above (n=5,986) participating in the General Social Survey (Cycle 17) were analyzed. Canadian seniors were most satisfied with their time use and least with their finances. While health limitations and the sense of mastery were important to all four domains, the physical environment and civic activities yielded increasingly idiosyncratic, domain‐specific effects. We further explore the significance of our findings using literature pertaining to resilience, the functional specificity of social relationships, and the maximum utility of resources.

Abstract Researchers have challenged the stereotype that farm women's roles and influence are primarily domestic by documenting the number of women's on‐farm roles. This study extends this approach by considering the interrelationships among women's roles and influence in reproductive and productive domains. A qualitative research method was used to investigate women's ways of describing the range of their on‐farm roles and the process of entry into and exit from those roles. Participants were farm women from south island, New Zealand. Findings showed women's wide range of involvement in household and farm labor, management, and ownership of their farms. Levels of involvement differed throughout the three phases of their farm careers: making a place, getting into it, retirement. Hypotheses were developed from the findings for further delineation of the range of women's on‐farm involvement and barriers and opportunities to the development of women's on‐farm careers.

The term 'care crisis' is invoked to denote chronic system failures and bad outcomes for the people involved. We present a comprehensive wellbeing framework and illustrate its practicality with evidence of negative outcomes for those who provide care. We find evidence of substantial material and relational wellbeing failures for family carers and for care workers, while there has been little interest in carers' views of their ability to live the life that they most value. Understanding and improving wellbeing outcomes for carers is an essential component of sustainable care, which requires the wellbeing of the different actors in care arrangements.