Informal care

The objective of the research reported here was to provide an opportunity to raise issues relevant to the ongoing debate on informal care of older people by exploring the attitudes of both men and woman towards the care of dependant older people. The sample (n = 174) was drawn from age cohorts 20-39 years (n = 90) and 40-59 years (n = 84). The men and women who participated in the study were members of the general public.

Objectives: To estimate annual changes and trends in the population of informal carers and to investigate transitions to caregiving by age, gender, locus of care, and level of involvement.

Design: Longitudinal analysis of data from the British household panel survey, 1991 to 1998, an annual prospective survey of a nationally representative sample of more than 5000 private households in England, Scotland, and Wales.

Informal care is today the form of support most commonly used in Spain by those who need help in order to carry out basic daily activities. The potential labour opportunity costs incurred by Spanish informal carers have not as yet been quantified. In this paper we use the Spanish subsample of the European Community Household Panel (1994–2001) to estimate an econometric model which we exploit to examine the effects of various types of informal care on labour market outcomes.

In 2004 in Europe, more than two-thirds of those born during 1945–54 had a parent or parent-in-law alive, and the rates of co-residence with their ascendants ranged from less than four per cent in Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands, to between 17 and 24 per cent in Italy, Spain and Greece. The proportions that had provided practical help to their parents during the previous 12 months had a north-south gradient, from approximately one-in-three in the northern countries to 15 per cent or less in the southern countries.

AIM OF THE STUDY: This study examined the experiences of informal carers who were aged 75 years and over.

BACKGROUND: It has been estimated that 13% of those aged over 65 years are providing some form of informal care. Although there is a substantial body of work reporting the experiences of informal carers, little attention has been paid to the specific situation faced by older carers.

Objectives: Much is known about the factors making caring for a spouse with dementia burdensome. However, relatively little is known about factors that help some spouses become resilient. We define resilience as ‘the process of negotiating, managing and adapting to significant sources of stress or trauma’. We aimed to assess whether spousal dementia carers can achieve resilience and to highlight which assets and resources they draw on to facilitate or hinder resilience, using an ecological framework .

An increasing demand for both formal and informal care is likely to result from the ongoing demographic transition at the same time as there is a further move away from the traditional domestic division of labour. Public policy-making that aims at increasing the supply of informal care necessitates knowledge about the relative importance of various incentives for individual care providers.

This paper studies if a situation of formal care unmet needs is a strong motivation for the onset of caregiving behavior, and if becoming caregiving is a compelling argument for leaving current job (in the presence/absence of formal care unmet needs). We use data from the Eurobarometer 67.3 for 18 European countries and estimate a three simultaneous equations model taking into account the potential endogeneity of labor participation and formal care unmet needs and assuming non-zero correlation among the error terms of the three equations.