Keating, Norah

Background: The term ‘care crisis’ is invoked to denote chronic system failures and bad outcomes for the people involved. Methods: We present a comprehensive wellbeing framework and illustrate its practicality with evidence of negative outcomes for those who provide care. Findings: 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.

Background: In the midst of a 'care crisis', attention has turned again to families who are viewed both as untapped care resources and as disappearing ones. Methods: Within this apparent policy/demographic impasse, we test empirically theorised trajectories of family care, creating evidence of diverse patterns of care across the lifecourse. The study sample, drawn from a Statistics Canada national survey of family care, comprised all Canadians aged 65 and older who had ever provided care (N = 3,299).

More than 30 years ago, Elder theorised multiple life-course trajectories in domains such as family and work, punctuated by transitions that create the structure and rhythm of individual lives. We argue that in the context of population ageing, family care should be added as a life-course domain. We conceptualise life courses of family care with core elements of 'care as doing' and 'care as being in relationship', creating hypothetical family care trajectories to illustrate the diversity of life-course patterns of care.

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. The authors 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.

Most research on stroke's impact on couples has focused on the transition to caregiving/receiving. Despite considerable evidence that marriage is the primary source of support in the face of chronic conditions, little is known about what happens to marriage in the context of care after stroke. To address this gap, we undertook a qualitative grounded-theory study of 18 couples in which one partner had experienced a stroke.

Research on informal care-giving has largely neglected the contributions of non-kin carers. This paper investigated the characteristics and contributions of non-kin who care for older adults with a long-term health problem, and investigated friends and neighbours as distinct categories of care providers. Using data from 324 non-kin carers in the 1996 General Social Survey of Canada, this study compared individual and relationship characteristics, care tasks and amount of care provided for the two groups.