Indicators of Familialism and Defamilialization in Long-Term Care

Ellen Verbakel , Radboud University
Marjolein I. Broese van Groenou, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Karen F. Glaser, King's College London
Martina Brandt, TU Dortmund University

This paper accompanies the data source about long-term care (LTC) indicators created by the IN-Care project (funded by the Open Research Area), which will become available to other researchers. IN-Care studies how LTC policies augment or reduce socio-economic inequalities in care use and informal caregiving. Following the theoretical contribution of Saraceno (2016), we argue it is important to use more fine-grained distinctions of familialization and defamiliazation in LTC policies, because the consequences for inequality in care use and provision may differ. In particular, we study supported familialism (e.g., informal caregiver support), supported defamiliazation through the market (e.g., in-cash benefits for care users), and defamiliazation through public provision (e.g., availability of beds in residential care). IN-Care contributes to the literature by providing statistical tests on large-scale country-comparative datasets to test the theoretical claim that SES inequality in care use and informal caregiving depend on the type of LTC support policy. For that purpose, we constructed indicators for each type of LTC support policy. This paper (1) outlines the theoretical ideas on the impact of LTC policies on SES inequality in care; (2) describes the LTC indicator dataset created by the IN-Care team, which will become available to other researchers; (3) present basic descriptive information on the LTC indicators.

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 Presented in Session 51. Policies for Ageing Populations