This paper investigates the prevalence of incapacity in performing daily activities and the associations between household composition and availability of family members and receipt of care among older adults with functioning problems in Spain, England and the United States of America (USA). We examine how living arrangements, marital status, child availability, limitations in functioning abili...

Government policies to shift care into the community and demographic changes mean that unpaid (informal) carers will increasingly be relied on to deliver care, particularly to older people. As a result, careful consideration needs to be given to informal care in economic evaluations. Current methods for economic evaluations may neglect important aspects of informal care. This paper reports the ...

BACKGROUND In a context of population ageing, it is a priority for planning and prevention to understand the socioeconomic (SE) patterning of functional limitations and its consequences on healthcare needs. This paper aims at measuring the gender and SE inequalities in functional limitations and their age of onset among the Southern European elderly; then, we evaluate how functional status is l...

BACKGROUND Demographic and socioeconomic changes have increased policy interest in informal carers. However, despite the multicultural nature of British society, most research in this field has been in majority communities. AIM To explore the role of the primary health care team (PHCT) in supporting carers from British South Asian communities. DESIGN OF STUDY Qualitative study. SETTING Fo...

With the exception of HIV care, informal caregiving of chronically ill lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults has received very limited attention in the extensive caregiving literature. This article reports on research that considered the social context of care and a dyadic caregiving approach for 36 chronically ill LGB adults ages 50 and older and their informal caregivers. In this study, bot...

Negotiation is an integral part of all elder care, which by definition involves a relation between at least two people. In this article, we analyse negotiations concerning elder care in the context of Finnish and Italian elder care policies. At the macro level negotiations on elder care are shaped by elder care policies and at the micro level by individual skills and resources. Our focus is on ...

BACKGROUND 'Choice' is increasingly pursued as a goal of social policy. However, the degree to which choice is exercised when entering an informal caring role is open to debate. AIM In this study, we examined the degree of choice and constraint in entering a caring role, and the relationship between choice and carers' well-being. METHODS Data were derived from 1100 responses to a postal sur...

Ageing is a global phenomenon. India is no exception to this demographic transition. The problems and issues of its greying population occupy the back seat. The current need is to conduct research and explore new directions in research on population ageing. Multi-disciplinary approaches to geriatric care can be fostered by collaborative training among medical, paramedical and other professional...

Rapid population aging in Japan has led to rising demands for informal care giving. Traditionally, care giving for aging parents has fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of women living in multigenerational households. However, rising labor force participation by Japanese women, declining marriage and fertility rates, and women's changing expectations have combined to produce unprecedente...

In this paper, we investigate the costs borne by both male and female carers in terms of their forgone formal employment opportunities. Traditionally, informal care was supplied by women but nowadays women are not only more likely to work, but also likely to be significant contributors to family finances. For women, this implies that the size of any forgone earnings cost of informal care is inc...