Working Carers of Frail Elderly---How to Make Employment and Care Responsibilities Compatible? (II)

The elderly population in Taiwan increased from 3% of the total population in 1971 to 7.1% in 1993, to 9.94% in 2006 and is expected to be over 20% in 2026. Close to 90% of disabled elderly persons are being cared for by their family members. The ongoing ageing of the population and the declining birthrate in the Taiwanese society will aggravate the problem and increase the significance of the issue regarding reconciliation between working and caring for working carers. Therefore, the research purposes of this study are to explore the difficulties and strategies of family carers of disabled elderly persons to reconcile employment and care work; and to investigate the needs for state measures do these working carers express that would make their paid employment and care responsibilities compatible, to develop and test a conceptual model and to conduct international and national comparative analysis. This research project is a three year study. Currently we are conducting the first year project and are applying for the second and third year. In the overall project, we will focus on secondary data analysis and documental research in the first year. The source of data will contain related national governmental documents, legislations and policies, published national and international literature and our previous data sets from studies on family care-giving to disabled elderly persons. Currently, we have had initial understanding about the influence of working condition on family carer’s role strains and health outcomes and have started to establish profile policy for the family carers. In the later half of first year and the second year, we will conduct a grounded theory approach to develop a conceptual framework to explain the process of reconciliation between work and family for working carers of disabled elderly persons. In this year, the similarities and differences among reconciliation of work for working carers of disabled persons in Taiwan with those in Finland, Sweden & Britain will be compared. In the third year, we will conduct a descriptive correlation study to further test the developed conceptual framework and also conduct comparative analysis using data from the current interdisciplinary project, an international survey (joint with Finland, Britain and Sweden) with working carers of other sub-groups (children, people with intellectual disability, indigenous carers, and immigrant carers). This project will be able to increase the knowledge-base, both at the national and the international level, for welfare states and labor markets as well as for carer and care user organizations to plan their measures in responding to the needs of working carers.

Project ID:PB9807-2588
External Project ID:NSC98-2621-M182-001