Age Relations and Care: Older People’s Experiences of Self-Care, Family/Friend Caregiving, and Formal Home Care

Abstract

This thesis examines the implications of age relations for older people’s negotiations of formal home care, family/friend caregiving, and self-care. Age relations constitute social processes, cultural discourses, and everyday practices that produce and sustain relations of inequality between and among people of different ages. Despite the overwhelming focus on care in the sociology of aging and in political discussions of aging societies, scholars have not clearly articulated how age relations shape, and are shaped by, experiences of later life care. Moreover, despite evidence that older people receive care from both formal care providers and family/friend caregivers—and that they continue to practise self-care when they receive care from others—we know little about the ways older care recipients negotiate the intersections that exist between these systems of care. Using data from a grounded theory study that involved qualitative interviews with 34 people aged 65 to 100 receiving home care in Ontario, this thesis considers how older people negotiate the intersections of formal home care, family/friend caregiving, and self-care, and how age relations can be used to understand experiences of later life care. Findings suggest that older care recipients attempt to strike a balance between self-care, formal home care, and family/friend caregiving, to access care that reflects their needs, preferences, and timelines. In doing so, they negotiate the tensions and contradictions that exist between the realities of impairment, illness, and care needs in later life; and the desire to remain self-sufficient and avoid “burdening” others with care needs. These findings provide insight into the everyday practices through which older people construct age relations in the context of care: when participants negotiate care arrangements, I suggest that they both reproduce and challenge the social processes and cultural discourses that are at the basis of age relations. Access to social and/or financial resources, however, had consequences for participants’ negotiations of care and of age relations.