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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Professional caring: homecare workers as fictive kin | | Author(s) | Tracy X Karner |
| Journal title | Journal of Aging Studies, vol 12, no 1, Spring 1998 |
| Pages | pp 69-82 |
| Keywords | Home care services ; Personnel ; Psychology [care] ; Personal relationships ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | In this article, the collaboration of both the care recipient and the formal caregivers to negotiate the social expectations of the appropriateness of family within the economic and situational realities of formal assistance are explored. The data were drawn from intensive interviews that were conducted as part of a larger evaluation study of a midwestern state's Social and Rehabilitative Services (SRS) Income Eligible and Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) programmes, United States (US). The introduction of professional strangers (homecare workers), into a sphere of intimacy is sometimes accomplished by constructing a familial relationship with the client. Thus the familial-type tasks provided by the stranger-caretaker can be reconstructed as appropriate and the realm of privacy and intimacy can be maintained. By "adopting" their homecare workers as fictive kin, the older person is able to maintain a sense of the cultural ideal of family caregiving, and to place kin expectation levels on the homecare worker, which can go well beyond the "assigned" duties of a respite employee. Additionally, the fictive kin relationship appears to provide homecare workers with a positive feeling and a sense of meaning in their work. (AKM). |
| Accession Number | CPA-980424408 A |
| Classmark | NH: QM: QN: DS: 7T |
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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