Social and Gender Differences in Informal Caregiving for Sick, Disabled, or Elderly Persons: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Introduction Informal caregivers are in increasing demand to provide care for sick, disabled, and elderly persons in the years to come, also in the Nordic welfare states. Informal caregivers can provide different types of care, such as personal care, supervision, and practical help, and previous research has shown that women take on a heavier care burden than men. However, structural differences in care tasks and caregiver burden in the Norwegian population is an under-researched area of study. Objective The study objective is to explore different types of informal care and caregivers in the Norwegian population and assess how different types of caregivers are distributed across socio-demographic groups. Methods A cross-sectional population survey was conducted in 2014. A random sample of 20,000 people above 16 years of age was drawn from the national population register. The net sample consisted of 4,000 individuals, giving a response rate of 20.2%. Data were collected using telephone interviews. We used descriptive statistics, crosstabulations with chi-square tests and multinomial regression analyses. Results Fifteen and seven percent of the respondents reported that they regularly helped persons with special care needs outside and inside their own household, respectively. Women were more likely than men to give personal care, whereas men were overrepresented among caregivers providing practical help only. The mean age of caregivers providing practical help only was significantly lower than for caregivers providing personal care. Conclusion Our results indicate that women take on a heavier care load, both by providing more personal care then men and in that they spend more time caring. It is important that nurses and other healthcare professionals in community care have knowledge about structures of inequality in informal caregiver tasks and burden so that they can better identify opportunities for improved coordination between formal and informal care.

The concept of informal care: ambiguities and controversies on its scientific and political uses

“…By contrast, the literature on long-term care (LTC) systems in a context of demographic aging places the emphasis not on the recognition of informal care as unpaid work, but on the recognition of its social value and its importance for the sustainability of care systems (EC, 2021a ; Tinios et al, 2022 ). Studies in the areas of health and social policies and aging analyse different aspects associated with informal care—the impacts on health (Verbakel, 2018 ; Zigante, 2018 ; Skinner and Sogstad, 2022 ), the role of gender (Uccheddu et al, 2019 ; Bertogg and Strauss, 2020 ; Skinner and Sogstad, 2022 ), the socio-economic inequalities (Bertogg and Strauss, 2020 ; Verbakel et al, 2022 ), the variation in the educational levels of informal careers (Lera et al, 2020 ; Rodrigues and Ilinca, 2022 ; Rostgaard et al, 2022 ).…”