Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter places the theory of care poverty in the context of other theories of care and provides an overview of the conflicts inherent in these theories, including the idea of ‘social citizenship’ – the right to access resources to meet needs, in this case care needs. Ideas about care poverty are used to offer a theoretical way of synthesising previous conflicting theories of care, testing this against kinship versus formal care provision. The chapter concludes that the concept of care poverty enables us to talk about the need for care as a social right, to reframe our thinking away from vulnerabilities and needs and towards a more emancipatory approach to care provision. As well as ontological power, the concept also has political power. The care poverty theory needs to be empirically tested and there is work to be done in comparative social policy to examine the ideas, institutions and actors that exacerbate and alleviate care poverty.
This chapter examines and compares unmet care needs among three groups of older people: (1) those using only formal care services; (2) those receiving only informal care; and (3) those receiving a combination of both, using data from the national survey Daily Life and Care in Old Age (DACO) collected in Finland. This chapter broadens the understanding of how care poverty has developed among service users and highlights how older people’s unmet care needs differ according to individual needs and the availability of different kinds of care and support.
As populations age around the world, there is an urgent need to address the inadequate and unequal provision of care and support to older and disabled people.
This book represents the first collective effort to use the concept of care poverty to analyse unmet needs and inequalities in care at an international level and from a social policy perspective. It presents pioneering empirical studies and novel theoretical and methodological approaches to unmet needs and care poverty.
This volume points the way forward for international care research and, in particular, for the growing field of research on inadequate care and support.
This chapter suggests population levels and individual experiences of care poverty are indicators of a strained care economy. The chapter describes how ‘unmet needs’ are documented and understood in Canada as a case example and argues a care poverty approach offers a more complete framework requiring a different set of methods and assumptions. In addition, care poverty allows for a fuller description of the multiple aspects of the care economy in ways that avoid repeating previous erasures of care scholarship and helps further bridge contemporary disability studies’ scholarship on the politics of care. In this way, care poverty is a more complete accounting of unmet home care needs in context, an indicator of a malfunctioning care economy, and a reminder that transformative change can happen through how societies organise care.
This chapter explores how measuring need and unmet need can help shift the focus of aged care systems from rationing care to enacting universal rights to quality care. Concepts and measures that encompass the salient dimensions of quality care and quality of life and provide transparent information about how and why aged care needs are met or remain unmet can help drive this policy shift. The chapter reviews measures of aged care drawing from various disciplines such as health, gerontology, social sciences and human rights. It reveals the strengths and limitations of different measurement approaches and explores how interdisciplinary approaches can more comprehensively document unmet need and provide better insights into achieving equity of access to quality aged care.
This introductory chapter presents the background, aims, key concepts and structure of the book. Based on a collaboration of social policy researchers from a range of countries and welfare settings, the book reviews and synthesises the state of the art of research on unmet care needs of older and disabled people. It brings together not only the empirical evidence but also the theoretical and methodological approaches of this growing strand of research literature. This empirical, theoretical and methodological knowledge is then framed and discussed under a new concept, that of care poverty, which highlights the structural basis and inequality dimension of the lack of adequate care and support. The book explores the relevance and potential of this approach for research and policy in different social and cultural contexts.
This chapter builds on the existing approaches to poverty measurement and discusses advantages and disadvantages of their adaptation for the measurement of care poverty. We shortly review the basic approaches to poverty measurement, which can be distinguished based on the measures of well-being (welfarist, non-welfarist) and the type of poverty threshold (absolute, relative) adopted. Already existing attempts to the measurement of care poverty are then described using these distinctions and measurement approaches that have not been applied so far are identified. We discuss a number of issues that can be useful to guide future empirical assessment of care poverty, especially in a comparative perspective. These include the relevance of using relative poverty thresholds to enable cross-country comparisons, the need to measure also the intensity of care poverty and the necessity of studying the underlying mechanisms behind care poverty to inform policy interventions.
This chapter looks at unmet long-term care needs from the perspective of family carers in Germany. As more than 80 per cent of older people in need of care are supported at home, the focus is on care for carers. The chapter shows that the ability to cope with caring responsibilities varies according to social structure categories such as gender, socioeconomic and educational background, employment status and ethnicity. The chapter uses intersectionality as an analytical framework to identify how interrelated systems of power affect those in vulnerable positions who undertake highly demanding caring tasks. It examines differences in carers’ abilities and unmet needs to cope with caring. It also argues that there are still differences between East and West Germany.
