Thank you for your interest in our study.
Since 2022, Professor Ito Peng’s team has conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with caregivers in Canada. We are continuing to conduct interviews. If you have recently been contacted for an interview, this information is for you.
For the current phase of the research, we have partnered with the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence. Our research goals are to understand the various aspects of the care economy in Canada. By “care economy,” we mean all of the work, both paid and unpaid, that contributes to the well-being of Canadians. We intend to use our findings for academic publications and to create economic models that governments can use. Currently, the economic models that our governments use do not consider unpaid care work. They are also inadequate for mapping and measuring the role of paid care providers in our economy. Furthermore, the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence is committed to using the research findings in their advocacy work to improve the lives and working conditions of paid and unpaid caregivers in Canada.
The research is part of a 9-country comparative research project called Care Economies in Context: towards sustainable social and economic development, led by the Centre for Global Social Policy at the University of Toronto. Today, many countries are confronted with care crisis arising from social and demographic changes such as aging population, changing traditional gender roles, and widening income inequality that have been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, the findings from your interview (in combination with others) can help us understand and alleviate an important global issue. Once all of the Canadian surveys and interviews are complete, we will use the information to compare Canada’s experience and system of care with those of other countries.
To select the participants for this study, we need a bit more information from you. You might have already provided this information for the survey that the Canadian Centre for Caregiving conducted through Leger in the summer of 2023. As part of the agreement for that study, however, that information was only provided in aggregate. For this phase of the research, we are particularly interested in interviewing care providers whose job involves care work, and people who are caring for at least one adult living with a disability. If you fit that criteria, please complete the short survey that we have prepared. This will help us ensure that we are interviewing people with a wide variety of caregiving experiences.
Once you have completed the mini-survey, we will select people to contact for an interview. If we select you, you should expect to hear from someone in the University of Toronto research team within the next six months (by the end of July 2024). The interview will contact you by email from an email address that ends “utoronto.ca.” At that point, they will remind you about the study and seek to schedule an interview at a time convenient for you.
The Interview
The interview will ask you to share your thoughts and experiences on providing care, what government support might make these easier, and the impacts of your care responsibilities on your life.
We expect the interview to last 60-90 minutes
We would like to conduct it on Zoom or on Whatsapp (it’s ok if you prefer to keep your camera off) and would like to record the interview.
We are aware that some of the topics may be emotional and will try to be sensitive to that in the interview.
Please try to find a private place for the interview and let the interview know if you anticipate being interrupting. We understand that can happen, especially among caregivers. However, there might be topics that you do not wish to discuss in front of the person you are caring for, or your employer. The interviewer will ask you about this at the beginning of the interview so you can make a plan if that is the case.
As a thank-you for your time, we will offer you a $20 Presidents’ Choice gift card.
Your Rights as a Research Participant
Agreeing to participate in this research does not take away any of your rights.
While we do not expect that there will be any negative consequences for you, you still have the right to change your mind and withdraw from the study at any time before or during the interview.
If you do choose to withdraw, that’s ok. We will still provide you with the $20 Presidents Choice gift card. if you want us to use the full interview up to the point you withdraw, we will. Or, we will delete the full interview. Up to you.
If you decide to withdraw after you have already completed the interview, we can delete your file up until the time that we’ve anonymized it. Typically, that’ll take a couple of months.
You also have the right to confidentiality and we will take measures to ensure that the recordings and transcripts kept secure. these measures include:
- allowing only the University of Toronto research team to listen to and transcribe the recordings of the interview
- anonymizing the transcripts before sharing them with our international research team (replacing your name with a fake name or code, and generalizing your location such that the particulars of the interview and the location cannot identify you)
- storing the data in secure, password-protected folders and an encrypted hard drive
Contact Information:
For information about the research, please contact cgsp@utoronto.ca. For information about your rights as a research participant, please contact Dean Sharp in the University of Toronto research ethics office (dean.sharp@utoronto.ca).