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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Training as a vehicle to empower carers in the community
— more than a question of information sharing | | Author(s) | Nicholas Clarke |
| Journal title | Health & Social Care in the Community, vol 9, no 2, March 2001 |
| Pages | pp 79-88 |
| Keywords | Informal care ; Rights [elderly] ; Advocacy ; Training [welfare work]. |
| Annotation | There has been a tendency to treat empowerment as synonymous with participation in decision-making, with little attention given to the "ecological" model of empowerment where linkages have been found between community participation and measures of psychological empowerment. Training has been suggested as a means whereby carers might be empowered. This study investigated whether attendance on a training programme to empower carers resulted in improvement of their levels of perceived control, self-efficacy and self-esteem as partial measures of psychological empowerment. Whereas carers' knowledge of services and participation increased as a result of the programme, no changes were found in measures of their empowerment. The most likely explanation for this is the failure to consider how training should be designed to achieve change in individual competence and self-agency. It is suggested that community care agencies should focus greater energies in determining how the policy objectives of empowerment are to be achieved through training, and in so doing make far more explicit the supposed linkages between training content, design and its posited impact on individual behaviour or self-agency. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-010511209 A |
| Classmark | P6: IKR: IQ: QW |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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