Suchergebnisse

Despite the increasing demand for long-term care (LTC) caused by demographic changes and several long-term care insurance (LTCI) program reforms, formal care in Japan is shrinking because of public financial constraints, leading to many problems for informal carers. Because more than half of the informal carers are employed in paying jobs, balancing working and caregiving roles is an important issue in the political agenda. Based on an online survey data of working carers of care recipients eligible for the LTCI program (N=600), this study aims to examine informal carers' challenging role within the Japanese LTC system, and analyze the work-life balance issues of working carers. The results reveal that most of the respondents are their parents' carers and more than half co-reside with the care-recipients. With the community promoting comprehensive care, many frail older adults now use a combination of formal and informal care services. Additionally, over three hours of informal caregiving per day, age, marital status, co-residence with the care recipient, self-rated health, and insufficient understanding of the caregiving role in the workplace are significantly related to the psychological well-being of informal carers. Furthermore, most of the aforementioned factors are also associated with turnover intention due to caregiving responsibilities. Informal care is a crucial component of the Japanese LTC system and to alleviate informal working carers' struggles and decrease unwanted turnover, it is necessary to consider the link between formal and informal care, together with support programs for informal carers.

This article explores the attitudes of Japanese and Lithuanian social work program teachers towards the challenges posed by modern technologies that may transform social work profession and studies. Study data revealed that scientists from both countries admit that "taming" technologies and optimally "cooperating" with them is the main challenge of social work practice and studies. On the one hand, belief that technological development will provide more opportunities to fulfil the mission of social work was prevalent among the study participants, on the other hand, they had expressed concern that eventually the use of technology will change the essence of social work as a profession of human relations or will create modified forms of social exclusion. Additionally, a niche for the new role of the social worker was identified: to help the world "occupied" by technology remain "social". Attitudes of research participants from both Lithuania and Japan can be linked to traditional concept of sociality and vision of social work as profession that belongs exclusively to area of human relations. B. Latour's asocial sociality concept can be applied for broader look into this situation. This concept states that efforts to trace the contribution of actors of an inhuman nature to what belongs in the human world may be more successful when one ceases to view the world exclusively through human eyes and tries to reveal the inner perspectives of phenomena of a mixed nature.