Caregiving and Care Sharing

About the Authors
Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction to Care Provision

Chapter 2: Changing Families

Chapter 3: Theory for Care: Integrating Your Caregiving Model

Chapter 4: Caring for Older Adults: Functional Capacity and Health Status

Chapter 5: Disability through the Life Course

Chapter 6: Care Provision and Severe Mental Illness

Chapter 7: Returning Veterans

Chapter 8: Caregiving Model for People with HIV/AIDS

Chapter 9: Grandparents Raising Grandchildren

Chapter 10: Caregiving with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Clients

Chapter 11: Immigrant Families: Caregiving Transitions

Chapter 12: Caregiving and Care Sharing: The Social Environment of Family Life

References
Index

Roberta R. Greene, PhD, was professor and the Louis and Ann Wolens Centennial Chair in Gerontology and Social Welfare at the School of Social Work, University of Texas at Austin. She served as a clinical social worker at Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, where she counseled Holocaust survivors and their families. She also resettled refugees who came to the United States from around world.

Dr. Greene has authored more than 100 publications in the areas of aging, human behavior, and social work. Her books include Social Work Practice: A Risk and Resilience Perspective, Resiliency Theory: An Integrated Framework for Practice, Research, and Policy, Human Behavior Theory and Social Work Practice, and Social Work with the Aged and Their Families.

Nancy P. Kropf, PhD, is associate dean at Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and professor, School of Social Work, Georgia State University. She is a John A. Hartford Geriatric Social Work Scholar and fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. As a practitioner, she was a therapist with families who have members with disabilities, and worked with grandparents who are raising grandchildren. Dr. Kropf has more than 100 publications in social work and aging, with the majority in the area of older adults in caregiving roles. Her books include Social Work & Restorative Justice: Skills for Dialogue, Peacemaking, and Reconciliation (coedited with Elizabeth Beck and Pamela Blume Leonard), Handbook of Psychosocial Interventions with Older Adults: Evidence-Based Treatment (coedited with Sherry M. Cummings), Competence: Theoretical Frameworks (cowritten with Roberta R. Greene), and Human Behavior Theory: A Diversity Framework (cowritten with Roberta R. Greene).

Caregiving and Care Sharing: A Life Course Perspective is not just another book on caregiving that identifies challenges and opportunities of caring for a particular population. Rather, it presents a distinctive model of social care as well as the concept of care sharing as a way to capture the intersections of the micro/macro aspects of caregiving within a broader societal context. Linked to core social work competencies, it posits an integrated practice model, which assesses and builds on resilience and is solidly grounded in social work’s primary theoretical perspectives and values. These practice models and theories are applied to rich complex cases that capture a wide range of care sharing situations across the life course, such as caring for someone with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, or posttraumatic stress. Throughout, issues of cultural diversity and cultural competence are skillfully addressed, resulting in a book relevant to generalist and advanced practice courses.

Nancy R. Hooyman, PhD, MSW
Hooyman Endowed Professor in Gerontology
Co-PI, CSWE National Center for Gerontological Social Work Education
University of Washington School of Social Work

Caregiving and Care Sharing was reviewed by Yeonjung Jane Lee for the journal Social Work.

With changes in family structure and diversity among older adults, caregiving has to be considered from a greater societal level. Informal caregivers are unpaid individuals who provide care for family or friends, whereas formal caregivers are paid for their services, often at care facilities (Family Caregiver Alliance [FCA], 2016). Approximately 40 million Americans provide care for older adults age 50 and older, and 60 percent of the caregivers are women (FCA, 2015; Hooyman & Kiyak, 2018; National Alliance for Caregiving & AARP Public Policy Institute, 2015).

Social workers are working with older adults from increasingly diverse families due to the growth in the divorce rate; female employment; multigenerational households; childless families; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) older adults (Hooyman & Kiyak, 2018). Two distinguished social work professors, Roberta R. Greene and Nancy P. Kropf, experts in the field of aging, have written a book proposing a holistic view of caregiving situations with case studies and theories. Greene not only served as professor at the School of Social Work, University of Texas at Austin, but has also worked with victims of the Holocaust and diverse refugees. Kropf, a professor of social work at Georgia State University, has clinical experience working with older adults and families.

Read the full review. Available to subscribers of Social Work.

Recent decades have brought significant changes in family form and function, as well as new service delivery models that promote health and well-being for people with various disabilities within their own homes and communities. Nevertheless, providing care to family members continues to be part of family life across the life course. This text discusses select caregiving situations that illustrate traditional models and emerging social work practice trends. These models may be used in a wider array of caregiving situations than is presented here.

This book was inspired by evolving caregiving theoretical approaches. For example, caregiving has usually been thought of as a family matter, often involving the care recipient and one primary caregiver. This text suggests a different point of view proposed by Daatland, a Swedish scientist who studied the life course and social welfare services for older adults. Daatland (1983) suggested that “caregiving be seen as a form of social organization that includes the interpersonal relationships and the division of practical tasks: a truly collective action, depending upon direct and indirect contributions from a number of actors, including the cared for himself ” (p. 1). That is, all activities of family and friends, state programs, and services should come together to form a coherent whole. Daatland also extended the caregiving concept to include the idea of social care, a network of formal and informal services that support care provision.

The term “social care” takes social workers back to their roots, when we were part of the fabric of the social welfare system, taking action to ensure that people’s basic needs were met. Practitioners worked closely with the client and client system to improve social functioning. This was a collective action—whether formal or informal—encompassing complex social relationships. This broad definition included practice methods as well as policy and programs to improve the wellbeing of people at risk and in need of care.

Still another influence was Stanley’s (2007) work on risk management in New Zealand’s child welfare system. Using a narrative perspective, Stanley described the social worker’s role as facilitating discourse among families, practitioners, and policymakers in order to reach an understanding of the level of risk for children and who is chosen to give care. Care sharing is another concept that gave rise to the approach taken in this book. Care sharing was coined by Covan (1998) to describe a type of care collective, a communal effort that organizes a combination of strategies to maximize pleasure and minimize losses that might otherwise be associated with the aging process.

This book aims to provide a fuller context for caregiving practice situations, “continuously discovering, appraising, and attending to changing locales, populations, scientific and technological developments, and emerging societal trends to provide relevant services” (Council on Social Work Education [CSWE], 2008, p. 6). Because of rapidly emerging caregiving innovations, such as those prompted by the Affordable Care Act, readers are encouraged to seek out new care strategies as they become available.