Join us on April17 for “Care peaks, plateaus, and loops: Narrative insights on stress from family caregivers for seniors”

On April 17 from 10 – 11:30 AM ET, Alexa Carson and Ito Peng will present “Care peaks, plateaus, and loops: Narrative insights on stress from family caregivers for seniors.” This hybrid event is part of the Care Economies in Context Speaker Series.

Abstract

With an aging demographic and increasingly stretched care services in many countries, the issue of unpaid care for seniors is a growing concern for families and policy makers alike. Empirical evidence highlights how unpaid caregiving can be a stressful and challenging experience. In this paper, we draw from and build on the stress process model, which conceptualizes caregiver stress as augmenting over time (Pearlin et al. 1990; Pearlin, Aneshensel, and Leblanc 1997), as well as relational framing from life course theory (Elder 1994; Elder and Giele 2009) and feminist political economics (Klostermann et al. 2022). Based on 57 in-depth interviews with unpaid caregivers for seniors across Canada, we articulate two non-mutually exclusive caregiver stress patterns that add nuance to understandings of caregiver stress. First, many caregivers describe their caregiving in peaks and plateaus, with minimal stress much of the time and spikes in stress at moments of crisis and transition. Second, some care journeys involve loops, with care for one senior ending, followed by care for another beginning shortly thereafter, which influences caregiver decisions and meaning making about care. We then highlight how socioeconomic status and complex care situations inequitably shape caregiver experiences.

Bios

Alexa Carson

Alexa Carson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She has a Master’s in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University and is the co-author of a book exploring youth homelessness in Canada.

Alexa’s current SSHRC-funded dissertation research examines family care for Latin American and Caribbean seniors in Toronto, Canada. Alexa’s article, “A Pressure Release Valve: South Korean Long-Term Care Policy as Supplemental to Family Elder Care,” was recently published in the Journal of Aging & Social Policy. She was awarded the 2023 Margaret Clark best graduate student paper prize by the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (AAGE).

Alexa was the lead RA for the qualitative interviewing of unpaid caregivers for children and seniors for the Canada team in the Care Economies in Context Project.

Ito Peng

Ito Peng is the Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the Department of Sociology and the School of Public Policy and Governance, and the Director of the Centre for Global Social Policy. She teaches political sociology and comparative public policy, specializing in family and gender policies and comparative welfare states. She has written extensively on gender, labour market, and political economy of social policy reforms in East Asia.

Professor Peng is the Project Director for the Care Economies in Context project, and was previously the Project Director for the Gender, Migration and the Work of Care project. She is also a co-principal investigator with Otgontugs Banzragc invstigating the care economy in Mongolia, and is collaborating with Monica Alexander on a project investigating the position of unregulated nannies in the Canadian childcare landscape. She is starting a project exploring the intersections of care and climate change.

In 2022, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2023 she received the President’s Impact Award and the Carolyn Tuohy Impact on Public Policy Award at the University of Toronto. These awards recognize her contributions to various policy communities, particularly in placing care work on the policy agenda in Canada and elsewhere.