Men

Daughter caregivers of elders with dementia become their parents' advocates over time. This role takes on even greater importance when one or both parents are placed in a long-term care facility. This article presents the results of a qualitative study aimed at explaining how this advocacy role evolves following institutionalisation. In-depth interviews were conducted with daughters (N = 14) of an institutionalised parent with dementia and selected using a theoretical sampling procedure.

Approximately 1,000,000men currently care for spouses with cognitive impairment after leaving market-economy careers through normative or early retirement. In the process, they made the difficult transition from work in the public arena to the private, largely invisible world of family care. This article explores how elderly men caregivers adapt to such drastic changes in social location, what resources they call upon to ameliorate the impact of those changes, and what we can learn from their experiences that will inform future research and practice.