Convenors: Ricardo Rodrigues (European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research) and Susan Phillips (Queen’s University Faculty of Health Sciences)

Socially mediated definitions of time spent care giving and receiving are deeply gendered. Thus far only limited consideration has been given in the care literature to intersecting social characteristics of gender and social location (e.g. socioeconomic position, geographical location, etc.). Intersectionality, understood here as overlapping categorizations and (dis)advantages, is at the core of the FutureGEN project, whose broader aim is to analyse gender inequalities in health and care from a cohort perspective. This symposium brings together papers that address intersectionality in care needs (e.g. disability) and in care giving and receiving in old-age, therefore appealing to an audience that encompasses care and health scholars. The time dimension is incorporated both in terms of time needed for care and historical time, through cohort analysis. The first paper (lead author: Susan Phillips, Queen’s University) titled “Systematic review of methods used to study the intersecting impact of sex and social locations on health outcomes” sets the scene for the relevance of intersectionality by discussing methods to address intersectionality in quantitative research, with applications beyond health and care for older people. The paper titled “Sex, ageing and disabilities: cohort trajectories of functional decline among older adults in Europe 2004-2017”, (lead author: Stefan Fors, Karolinska Institute) uses quantitative methods to show how disabilities in later life in cohorts of women and men have evolved between 2004 and 2017 across geographical locations. This is followed by a paper titled “Gender differences in access to community-based caring resources in old age: An examination of the effects of widowhood and living arrangements” focusing on the impact of widowhood on use of care for women and men of different socioeconomic backgrounds (lead author: Stefania Ilinca, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research). The symposium concludes with the paper titled “Caregiving across European cohorts between 2004-2015: is there evidence of changing gender patterns across care regimes?”, which analyses evolving gender differences in caregiving across different geographic locations (lead author: Ricardo Rodrigues, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research). In addition, we plan to have Prof. Francesca Bettio (University of Siena) as an external discussant for this Symposium.

Convenors: Sílvia Bofill-Poch (University of Barcelona) and Paloma Moré (University of A Coruña)

This symposium deals with the reorganization of care work times within households from the perspective of paid and unpaid long-term caregivers during the corona pandemic. Applying a temporal analytical perspective (Durán, 2007; Folbre, 2004; Ramos, 2007; Adam, 1995), we will explore to what extend care work times have been altered in a context where the provision of care services has been temporarily altered and the caring role of the family strengthened. The symposium will also address the needs (whether public or private) and assumptions shaping changes in care work times, as well as the effects of such changes on the reproduction, or even intensification, of gender, class or race inequalities. The symposium brings together, from a critical feminist perspective, papers on both, unpaid family careers and paid domestic workers, offering a comparative perspective on time policies and care regimes between Southern Europe (Spain) and Latin America (Chile). Regarding family care in the Spanish case, sociologists Sara Moreno-Colom and Vicent Borràs (Autonomous University of Barcelona) will present a paper entitled “The Spanish ideal ‘of being taken care at home by relatives’ meets lockdown”, and sociologist Marcela Jabbaz (University of Valencia) and anthropologist Montserrat Soronellas (Rovira i Virgili University) a second one about “Changes in care times of family careers of dependent adults during the pandemic”. These two papers present the theoretical debate on the social organization of care and the uses of time from a gender perspective, together with the work-life balance debate. The paper by Chile-based anthropologist Herminia Gonzálvez (Central University of Chile), “In the frontline: social care for the elderly in pandemic contexts”, focuses on care policies and familistic care regimes in order to reflect on the unequal ability of households to cope with increasing caring responsibilities. Finally, the paper by Spain-based anthropologists Carmen Gregorio (University of Granada) and Ana Lucía Hernández (University of Zaragoza),”Domestic workers: the meaning of their work-life times in the COVID19 crisis”, raises questions related to changing domestic workers’ care work times by focusing on their employers’ new fears and time demands. The symposium addresses a broad audience in social sciences.

Discussant: Alessandro Gusman, University of Turin 

Convenors: Petra Ezzeddine (Charles University) and Michael Leiblfinger (Johannes Kepler University)

Transnational care migration was affected in numerous ways during the COVID-19 pandemic: Closed borders limited the ability of care workers to travel. Travelling itself was accompanied with an additional risk of contagion. Live-in carers were asked to extend their rotas and not to leave the households in an effort to protect the elderly in their care. They also faced psychological burdens of worrying about their own families and weighing those worries against maintaining an income as migrant live-ins abroad. Governments reacted to (potential) care(r) shortages with various measures. The specific temporal work arrangements (circular migration or repetitive temporal migration) were shaped by the biopolitical measures (e.g., frequency of obligatory testing) at borders. This ‘permanent temporality’, which usually enables care workers to coordinate their own reproductive and productive activities during care migration, seems to be collapsing in times of crises. Four papers covering care migration from Central and Eastern Europe discuss these developments: Uhde and Ezzeddine show how the pandemic shed light on the everyday functioning of the transnational political economy of social reproduction based on regional inequalities within Europe and discuss Czech care mobility faced with changing border regimes and biopolitics during COVID-19. Safuta’s contribution is based on the online activity of Polish migrant live-ins working in Germany during the first months of the pandemic and shows how those workers dealt with old and new challenges related to their transnational living and working conditions. Leiblfinger, Prieler, Rogoz, and Sekulová investigate the impact of COVID-19 related policy responses for transnationally organised live-in care in Austria and its most important sending countries Romania and Slovakia as interconnected care mobility. Seiffarth focuses on Romanian live-in care workers in Italy, one of countries hit hardest by the pandemic and a country relying heavily on care at home, which in turn highlighted the vulnerabilities of those working closely with the at-risk elderly population. Our interdisciplinary panel brings together junior and senior researchers in the field of care migration as well as the perspectives from both sending and receiving countries.

Papers:

• The Transnational Political Economy of Social Reproduction in Central Europe; Zuzana Uhde (Czech Academy of Sciences) and Petra Ezzeddine (Charles University, Prague)
• A transnational care market in pandemic times: Migrant care workers in Germany between a deadly virus, households in need and agencies in demand; Anna Safuta (University of Bremen)
• Confronted with COVID-19: Migrant live-in care during a pandemic; Michael Leiblfinger (Johannes Kepler University Linz), Veronika Prieler (Johannes Kepler University Linz), Mădălina Rogoz (International Centre for Migration Policy Development, Vienna), and Martina Sekulová (Slovak Academy of Sciences)
• Crises as catalysts? The case of Romanian migrant care workers in Italian home-based care arrangements; Marlene Seiffarth (University of Bremen)

Discussants:
Ewa Ślęzak (Cracow University of Economics) and Bernhard Weicht (University of Innsbruck)

Symposium convenors: Helena Hirvonen, University of Eastern Finland

Changes brought by ageing societies have raised the question of the need for health and social care policy reforms and shifts from state-sponsored to market-driven service systems across the globe. Formal provision of long-term care of older persons increasingly operates within a context shaped by neoliberal market conditions. Need for increasing efficiency, along with goals of user-centered and transparent service provision are encouraging service providers to take on new technological solutions. As a consequence, services for older persons are becoming increasingly reliant on digital platforms, tools and applications. This alters the work practices of care work as well as the daily life of older persons. Overall, the key question seems to be how to deliver high-quality yet cost effective and equally accessible services. Digitalization affects care and work, the means, process as well as the experiences of the different actors involved in the long-term care of older persons. In the middle of it all, time remains an essential resource for both those providing and those receiving care.
The symposium is relevant to the conference theme as it highlights the importance to understand the connections between temporality and digitalization, and how these mutually contribute to how care and care services manifest. The four papers address the intertwinement of digital and temporal based on the latest research on the topic. The aim of the symposium is to bring forth a compelling and critical discussion on how digitalization affects the perceptions, control over, negotiations, and the actual allocation of time in long-term care of older persons. The symposium discusses the phenomenon from a variety of viewpoints, with a primary focus on formal care work, and the perspectives of both care workers and service users.
The convenor of the symposium is a member of the Academy of Finland funded Centre of Excellence in Research of Ageing and Care, Research group ’New Technologies, Ageing and Care’ (PI Sakari Taipale).

Description of papers and their presenters:

• Paper 1: Temporalities of digital care

Annette Kamp, Roskilde University (co-authored with: Sidsel Lond Grosen, Roskilde University; Agnete Meldgaard Hansen, Roskilde University.)

The paper explores how digitalization of care work that aims at supporting the paradigm of personalized, rehabilitative care, affects temporalities of care. ICT is assumed to imply acceleration, intensification and fragmentation of work. However, temporalities are shaped, constructed and juggled in daily practise. This ‘juggling of time’ in specific cultural and professional contexts is the point of departure for contextual development based on ethnographic study of the digital technologies in Danish Eldercare.

• Paper 2: Sense of Belonging Disrupted – Care Work Gone Online

Antti Hämäläinen, University of Jyväskylä (co-authored with: Mia Tammelin, Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences; Riitta Hänninen, University of Jyväskylä & Helena Hirvonen, University of Eastern Finland)

The paper is based on a study of digitalization in 24/7 residential care units, where mobile applications are increasingly used to organise workCare workers resort to digital application in efforts to ‘make time’ for care in a service environment that aims for efficient delivery of services. The paper points on the one hand to the risks of blurring of work-life interface as a consequence of growing use of digital platforms that reorganize the spatial and temporal spheres of care work. On the other hand, new opportunities to build a sense of community emerge through digitalisation.

• Paper 3: Migration related vulnerabilities in the time of independent agency – Struggling with digitalised social welfare services in Finland.

Ulla Buchert, University of Helsinki

The paper discusses the transition from street-level to screen-level bureaucracies and the agency expected from the service users. The embracing of independent digital agency seems to drive people with intersecting vulnerabilities dependent on informal help, which may endanger their privacy, compromise realisation of their social rights and expose them to abuse.

• Paper 4: Considering the ‘Ageist Factor’ in Designing Policy and Digital Technology for Older Adults

Ittay Mannheim, Tilburg University

The paper presents recommendations of a policy brief based on on-going research in ‘Euroageism’ Horizon 2020 ITN. Ageism is a potential barrier that affects use, adoption and design of digital technology and related policies. The paper highlights the importance of older adults’ involvement, consideration of their needs and desires, in development and implementation of (health related) digital technologies.

Discussants:

Eveline J.M. Wouters, Fontys University of Applied Science & Tilburg University

Virpi Timonen, Trinity College Dublin

Convenors/discussants: Mia Vabø (Oslo Metropolitan University) Annette Kamp (Roskilde University)

Since the golden age of welfare expansion, ranges of reform steps have been taken to make elder care services more cost- efficient. Many steps have been inspired by NPM– a global wave of reforms based on market-oriented logics aiming at enhancing organizational efficiency and accountability, but failing to address other political/administrative values such as fairness, equity, safety and reliability.
NPM doctrines have been widely criticized by social scientist, exactly because they are disconnected from the political and practical world they aim to change. However, this critique have often taken reductionist forms, implicitly assuming that all changes belong to NPM paradigm, thus disregarding how NPM intertwines with classical bureaucracy aiming at legal security or with structural reforms inducing professional logics. They tone down how ‘old’ relational modes of care lingers on or how care practices are challenged or revitalized by new global visions of ‘active ageing’ and person-centred care and reablement.
In this symposium, we emphasize the need for more context- and time-sensitive approaches. Rather than seeing contexts as static ‘scene settings’, we regard contexts as made up by multiple agents who are actively interpreting what is going on.
Moreover, we regard contexts as temporally interconnected: Drivers of change may be located in the past, present and future time and may influence reforms as ‘path breaking’ events, by ‘collision of trajectories’ and ‘reactive sequences’. Time is not necessarily a progressive movement forward, but can often mean going backwards.
Papers presented will highlight how complex and shifting contexts influences the practical world of front line staff and the ones they care for. Papers will pay attention to the way in which tension and dilemmas are interpreted, resolved and handled – in processes of needs assessment and service allocation; in inter-professional practices and in interaction with care recipients.

Paper presenters and tentative titles:

• Lea Graf: Is NPG the new black? The interplay between new and old modes of governance in Nordic elder care systems
• Helle Cathrine Hansen: New reform trends in the making: the process of rebuilding trust in public home care.
• Maya Flensborg Jensen: Valuating care for ageing bodies: valuation devices and negotiations of care in the context of reablement
• Betina Dybbroe: Changing knowledge regimes and professional practices in rehabilitative care
• Christine Øye. Keeping fitness at a distance: Maneuvering in the complex terrain of public day-care institutions in the era of
  `active aging`.

Convenor: Costanzo Ranci, Politecnico di Milano

In the last decade, the most common strategy adopted in many European countries to deal with the care deficit has been ‘ageing in place’. However, ageing in place has many limitations. It requires an adequate housing context and the existence of an active informal social network. Moreover, it brings about substantial risks for frail older people themselves, including the risk that permanence at home may increase their social and spatial isolation. Effective measures should be therefore developed to protect frail older people from these risks and to guarantee them the best possible quality of life and care as they age.
This symposium is aimed to present and discuss the main results of a research carried out in 2019-2021 in Italy about ageing in place. Three papers based on empirical research will be presented: the first is about the relationship between frailty and risk of loneliness; the second one explores the care arrangements of frail older people living alone; and the third addresses the housing and living conditions of such people. All these papers are based on 120 interviews of frail older people living alone in different contexts (urban/rural contexts; northern/southern areas). Based on these contributions, the symposium will start a debate about loneliness and frailty in older age, and policies addressing the care needs of people experimenting such situation. Two international scholars are invited to open the discussion on such issues.

Program:

• Marco Arlotti and Stefania Cerea, Frailty and loneliness among older people living alone
• Giovanni Lamura, Gabriella Melchiorre, Care arrangements of frail older people living alone in Italy
• Flavia Martinelli, Antonella Sarlo, Francesco Bagnato, Time and space in care

Discussants. Tine Rostgaard and Margarita Leon (to be confirmed)

Convenors: Elena Moore (University of Cape Town) and Sara Cantillon (Glasgow School for Business and Society)

This symposium examines the state’s response to the care for young children during the pandemic and the implications for challenging ‘gendered’ assumptions and responsibilities around paid and unpaid care work. It looks at case studies across the Globe (UK, South Africa, Brazil and Italy) to explore the ways in which the pandemic changes or reinscribes traditional patterns of care for young children. In almost all countries, the Covid-19 lockdown brought about the closure of all preschools, nurseries, early child centres, with parents and caregivers expected to work from home while caring for their children. The need for ‘time’ between care responsibilities and paid work did not only revolve around a ‘balance’ but also the ability to carve out time for paid work which was experienced unevenly across race, class and gender divides. During the Covid-19 outbreak, time became very short and was negotiated with different actors including the State. In some countries the state embarked on specific programmes to manage childcare services for essential workers. In others, the state failed to even be attentive to the care needs of parents. State responses to how childcare for young children was managed during the pandemic, comes back to how childcare has been enabled, supported and managed in different countries. Research findings since the start of the pandemic indicates the heightening of traditional patterns of care along race, gender and class lines. But it also suggests that men are becoming more involved in childcare and household responsibilities. By mapping out the response of the state to childcare across the Global South and North, we shine a light on how, and for whom, the pandemic has made ‘care’ visible and whether this ‘visibility’ is transient or in fact engendering longer-term change, particularly around the disrupting of gendered responsibilities for paid and unpaid care work.

4 named paper authors

• Elena Moore and Nonzuzo Mbokazi, University of Cape Town: ‘‘We have not given it full consideration”: The South African state’s response to care and caring for young children during Covid-19
• Sara Cantillon and Nina Teasdale, Glasgow Caledonian University: On the verge of collapse? Covid-19, the State and the provision of childcare. Exploring the pillars propping up the UK sector.
• Renata Moreno, Sao Paulo: Covid-19, women’s work in childcare public services, families and neighbourhoods in Brasil
• Allesandra Milleno and Lidia Manzo, University of Milan: Mothers, childcare duties, and remote working under COVID-19 lockdown in Italy: Cultivating communities of care

Discussant: Angela O’Hagan, Glasgow Caledonian University

Detailed description of the papers’ contributions

• ‘‘We have not given it full consideration”: The South African state’s response to care and caring for young children during Covid-19

Elena Moore and Nonzuzo Mbokazi, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town

This article demonstrates the state’s wilful neglect of care and caring by focussing on the needs of care for young children and their caregivers during the Covid-19 pandemic. We argue that the state’s ignorance of the different levels of care and care needs of young children including the early child development needs of the children and the needs of primary caregivers, professional caregivers and the wide sector of early childcare highlights the systemic failure of the state’s duty to care, protect and provide for children. Whilst other parts of the world were supporting at least some level of care for essential workers, the South African Minister of Basic Education as late as 30 April 2020 (5 weeks into heavy lockdown), answered a question at a press conference about when Early Child Development Centres (ECD) will reopen by saying that the question had “come out repeatedly”, but that they had “not given it full consideration”. Compared to other parts of the world, care for young children and their carers, was not even an afterthought. We outline how the failure occurred at three intersecting and connected levels. Firstly, the state failed to issue subsidies, cater for or support care centres with the ensuing result of thousands of job losses and ECD closures and suspension of food programmes. Secondly we demonstrate the failure of the state to treat primary caregivers as citizens in the design of the state economic relief package which excluded primary caregivers of children who already received a social grant on behalf of their child, from applying for a special Covid-19 grant, akin to a basic income grant. Thirdly, by drawing on the findings of care practices amongst a sample of low-income employed black South African mothers with young children during Covid-19, we argue that the state’s failure to be attentive to the needs of care and caregivers and the wider early childcare sector resulted in low-income black women carrying the responsibility and cost of care at a time of extensive job losses and food insecurity. The findings reveal the reinscription of traditional patterns of care based along gendered, racialised and classed lines. We argue that the negligence is indicative of the state’s marginalisation of matters of care even at a time when care became a central question across the globe. We reflect on how we understand care and its possible future in such contexts given the state’s inattentiveness to all levels of care for young children and their caregivers.

• On the verge of collapse? Covid-19, the State and the provision of childcare. Exploring the pillars propping up the UK sector.

Sara Cantillon and Nina Teasdale, Glasgow Caledonian University

While historically childcare in the UK has been understood as a family and individual responsibility, policy dramatically shifted under the New Labour government (1997-2010) with the initial roll-out in the late 1990s of universal free part-time early education for 3 and 4 year olds in England, with similar policies operating in the other UK nations. This was accompanied by various forms of tax credits and childcare vouchers aimed at reducing childcare costs for working parents (Naumann, 2015). Despite substantial investment, the UK system is complex and the cost of childcare has remained high compared to other countries. There have also been long-term problems with availability and the underfunding of childcare providers to deliver the free state entitlement (Coleman et al., 2020). In this paper, we argue that Covid-19 has exposed not only the centrality of care to social and economic life (WBG, 2020), but also the fragility of the UK childcare sector – with it recently being described as on the ‘verge of collapse’ (Siddiq, 2020). Indeed, despite the UK government’s recognition of the importance of childcare to allow key workers to work during the national lockdown, the childcare sector has since been neglected in its recovery planning. We draw upon a range of qualitative and quantitative data, reports and studies published since the start of the pandemic to explore through a gender and intersectional lens the factors or key pillars propping up the UK sector. This includes grandparents, family and friends as informal and wraparound carers, especially for lower paid workers; and the reliance of state policy on poorly paid and undervalued childcare workers and mothers reducing their hours or moving into part-time work to reconcile work-family responsibilities. The paper concludes by considering the consequences for gender equality and transcending gendered notions of the division of labour, as well as the conceptual importance of care work as central to the intersecting and intertwining of the social and the economic, and the policymaking underpinning it.

• Childcare, food security and responsibilities: State inefficiency and women’s work during the pandemic in Brazil

Renata Moreno, SOF

In Brazil the access to childcare facilities is characterized by great regional and income inequalities. Therefore, women’s work (paid and unpaid) in families and neighbourhoods plays a key role in providing childcare in a scenario of care injustice, intensified by the neoliberal adjustment policies since 2016. This article discusses the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on childcare arrangements from the perspective of women’s work, considering the interfaces between State and family, and State and community. The analysis runs along two axes. The first focuses on women’s work: the role played by childcare workers (of public facilities) in their relationship with children and their families during the pandemic, in face of the slow response of public authorities; and the pandemic effects in the daily paid and unpaid work of women who are responsible, in their families, for children. The second axis of analysis discusses the effects of the disruption of day care centres on the food security of children, critically analysing the insufficient response of the State on this matter. The analysis problematizes the processes (public, private and/or precarious) of taking responsibility for care, its changes and continuities during the covid-19 pandemic. The reference of this analysis is the city of São Paulo, particularly a public day-care centre and its surroundings in a peripheral neighbourhood of this capital.

• Mothers, childcare duties, and remote working under COVID-19 lockdown in Italy: Cultivating communities of care

Alessandra Minello, (Florence University) and Lidia Manzo (University of Milan)

Drawing on a virtual ethnography and expanding on existing research, the paper explores how the increase in remote working has created unequal domestic rearrangements of parenting duties with respect to gender relations during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. We also discuss the resources that mothers have mobilized to create a network of social support in the organization of care.

Convenors: Kate Hamblin (University of Sheffield) and Giovanni Lamura (INRCA-IRCCS: National Institute of Health and Science on Ageing; Centre for Socio-Economic Research on Ageing)

This session explores some of the myriad ways time and technology in care arrangements and systems are interconnected. In many countries, technology has been part of policy approaches to promote ‘ageing in place’ and can facilitate the balance between care and paid work for those supporting others (Hassan) and as a means to negotiate spatial distance when caring networks are not co-located. This has implications for care, which technology can render instantaneous, while disrupting its more traditional aspects such as proximity and touch (Lariviere). We are also observing a shift in policy and practice over time as digital and mainstream devices are used in care arrangements, by necessity as analogue solutions become obsolete and as part of a drive for innovation, bringing new challenges for regulation, ethics, privacy and risk (Hamblin) and issues related to the ‘digital divide’ in the skills to use and access to these devices, with implications for practice (O’Loughlin et al.).

The following papers are included, with discussant Professor Andreas Hoff (Zittau-Görlitz University of Applied Sciences):

• Technology and Social Care in a Digital World: UK Policy and Practice Shifts, Kate Hamblin, University of Sheffield, UK.
• Care at a distance? Temporal and spatial dimensions of technology-mediation in care, Matthew Lariviere, University of Sheffield, UK.
• Role of healthcare professionals in supporting digital technology use for successful ageing in place, Kate O’Loughlin, Meryl Lovarini, Lindy Clemson, Ageing and Health Research Group, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Australia.
• Current challenges for the deployment of information and communication technology solutions for Informal Carers, Alhassan Yosri Ibrahim Hassan, NRCA-IRCCS, Centre for Socio-Economi​c Research on Ageing, Italian National Institute of Health & Science on Ageing, Ancona and Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Faculty of Economics “Giorgio Fuà”, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy.

Convenor: Andrea Doucet, Brock University

In many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to what many commentators are calling a ‘she-cession’ where women are reducing their paid work hours and opportunities or leaving their jobs altogether. Although these decisions are negotiated within complex personal and socio-political contexts of gendered commitments and structures of paid work and unpaid care work, for families with young children, the pandemic has revealed, intensified, and exacerbated women’s long-standing responsibilities for care work and domestic life. Time-use studies (surveys and diaries) are currently the most widely used and trusted methodological approach for measuring gender divisions of housework and care. In the past decade there have been considerable methodological advancements in how to study and assess daily time use. At the same time, there is a growing critique of the efficacy of time-use studies for assessing and measuring care responsibilities and a call for attending more to conceptual and methodological complexities in how care time and temporalities are viewed, lived, and experienced by diverse populations. This symposium explores and debates conceptual, methodological, and epistemological issues in assessing and measuring unpaid care work and care responsibilities. It brings together several leading writers on care, gender divisions of housework and care, and time and temporality.

Paper authors and titles:

• Melissa Milkie (University of Toronto, Canada): Parents’ Time “With” versus “For” Children: Social Status Dimensions
• Oriel Sullivan (University College of London, UK): Changing Activities, Housework and Care during Periods of Different Social Restrictions in the UK
• Brenda S.A. Yeoh (National University of Singapore, Singapore): The Critical Temporalities of Serial Migration: Negotiating Care Relations among Migrant-Sending Families in Southeast Asia
• Andrea Doucet (Brock University, Canada): Care responsibilities and time: Methodological, conceptual, and epistemological issues

Discussant: Nancy Folbre (University of Massachusetts, USA)

Convenor: Marjolein Broese van Groenou, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Ageing societies and recent reforms to long-term care (LTC) in many countries are likely to make informal care by kin and nonkin increasingly critical for fulfilling the care needs of older people. To date, it is unknown whether informal care falls disproportionately on disadvantaged populations. The IN-CARE project (a collaboration of Dutch, British, German research teams; http://in-care.fk12.tu-dortmund.de/) examines if and how LTC reforms exacerbate existing social disparities in care use and provision in older age, which fits nicely into the TCC theme of Time and Temporality in Care. To this end, this project compares the socioeconomic status (SES) gradient in formal and informal care across Europe over time. A particular effort is made to include macro-level indicators of LTC systems in cross-level analyses across countries and operationalize these according to the typology of (de)familialization of Saraceno. The first paper presented in this symposium concerns a description of the macro-level database and how it may be used in exploring the macro-micro link in studies on care use. In the second paper, the UK team studied SES-inequality in care receipt across European nations with different care systems; the third paper presented by the German team studied the same question but now among caregivers, and the fourth paper by the Dutch team studies SES-inequalities in care use within the Netherlands over time (1995-2015). The symposium will start off with a short description of the IN-CARE project (2019-2022). Tine Rostgaard will be our discussant.

Individual abstracts

• APPLYING THE TYPOLOGY OF (DE)FAMILIALIZATION TO MACRO-LEVEL INDICATORS OF LONG TERM CARE POLICIES

Ellen Verbakel, Radboud University

This presentation describes the newly created database on long-term care (LTC) indicators created by the IN-Care project and available to other researchers. Following the theoretical contribution of Saraceno (2016), we argue it is important to use more fine-grained distinctions of familism and defamilisation in LTC policies, because the consequences for inequality in care use and provision may differ. In particular, we study supported familism (e.g., informal caregiver support), supported defamilisation through the market (e.g., in-cash benefits for care users), and defamilisation through public provision (e.g., availability of beds in residential care). We constructed indicators for each type of LTC support policy. This presentation (1) outlines the theoretical ideas on the impact of LTC policies on SES inequality in care; (2) describes the LTC indicator dataset created by the IN-Care team, which will become available to other researchers; (3) presents basic descriptive information on the LTC indicators.

• SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITIES IN CARE RECEIPT AT OLDER AGES: A COMPARATIVE EUROPEAN STUDY

Ginevra Floridi, Ludovico Carrino & Karen Glaser, King’s College London

As the prevalence of LTC rises in European societies, it is important to evaluate the consequences of different forms of care for the wellbeing of care recipients. Crucially, if the consequences of care for wellbeing vary by socio-economic status (SES), this may lead to greater inequalities in health among adults with care needs. In this study we examine the longitudinal associations between different types of home-care (informal, formal and mixed) and subsequent wellbeing (quality of life and depression) among physically-impaired individuals aged 50 and above. We propose a theoretical model of SES inequalities in the consequences of care for wellbeing, and empirically assess SES differences in the longitudinal associations using data from the SHARE survey. On average, we do not find evidence that informal, formal or mixed care are associated with changes in wellbeing. However, informal and formal care are linked with better outcomes among wealthier – relative to poorer – individuals.

• SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITIES IN INFORMAL CARE PROVISION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE WELLBEING OF INFORMAL CAREGIVERS ACROSS EUROPE

Nekehia Quashie, Judith Kaschowitz, Christian Deindl & Martina Brandt – TU Dortmund University

We assess socioeconomic inequalities in informal care provision and its consequences for the wellbeing of informal caregivers. The literature states that a lower socio economic status (SES) is linked to a higher probability to give care (at higher intensities) which then leads to a higher caregiving burden. People with lower SES additionally have fewer resources to alleviate caregiving pressures. Thus, they are likely to experience decreased wellbeing compared to those with higher SES. Our analyses based on data from SHARE and ELSA confirm, that individuals with lower SES are indeed more likely to provide care all over Europe. They also report a lower wellbeing than people with higher SES, even if controlling for further important influences. In the next step we investigate longitudinally, if taking over care responsibilities leads to a wellbeing decline and if this decline is more pronounced for people with lower SES.

• SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN LONG-TERM CARE: A COMPARISON OF THREE TIME PERIODS IN THE NETHERLANDS

Jens Abbing, Bianca Suanet & Marjolein Broese van Groenou, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

This study aims at investigating to what extent inequalities in the use of formal, informal and privately paid care have changed over time. Data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) was used from three points in time (1995, 2005 and 2015) that capture distinct periods in the recent development of the Dutch long-term care system. In particular, the reforms of 2007 and 2015 might have impacted care uses. All participants (N = 1810) were living at home and between the age of 75 and 85 at measurement. The results indicate that, adjusted for health and partner status, formal, informal and privately paid care have decreased over time. Socioeconomic differences in informal care use have increased over time, but no change was found for privately paid or formal care use. These findings suggest that changes in the LTC system and long-term care resources in particular benefit lower socioeconomic groups.