Care in Times of Crises: an intersectional approach to socio-economic inequalities in giving and receiving informal care during the COVID-19 and cost-

Informal carers - those who provide unpaid help to individuals who need support for a range of reasons, such as disability or old age - play a vital role in delivering health and social care to those in need. COVID-19 brought unprecedented changes to social life, including to informal care networks. Studies have linked the pandemic to changing care experiences which exposed inequalities between caregivers and the vulnerabilities of care-recipients. The emerging cost-of-living crisis is likely to exacerbate these, as welfare provisions become severed, and formal care services become less affordable, the demand for informal care increases considerably. For 77% of informal carers the rising cost-of-living is one of the main challenges they expect to face in the coming year. Whilst some caregivers can combine caring with paid work, and care-receivers can afford the additional cost of care, others cannot. These pre-existing inequalities mean that individuals do not experience informal care exchanges and their economic wellbeing repercussions to the same extent, meaning inequalities can widen or newly develop.
This project will advance understanding of informal care exchanges during times of health and socio-economic crises in the UK. Its contribution to knowledge is three-fold. Firstly, it takes a dual perspective, by focusing on caregivers and receivers. Secondly, it adopts a longitudinal approach to understand current patterns of caregiving and receiving, by acknowledging differences in prior trajectories with respect to the nature, intensity, and frequency of care, and the way these might be affected differently by the changing socio-economic scenario. Thirdly, it enhances understanding of inequalities in care exchanges through adopting a novel intersectionality lens, looking at multiple dimensions of inequalities of caregivers and vulnerabilities of care-receivers, and how they combine to produce cumulative (dis)advantages. In order to do so this project will integrate the Informal Care Model (Broese van Groenou and Boer, 2016) with Crenshaw's intersectionality paradigm providing new insights into dimensions of inequalities and their intersections in informal care, for both caregivers and receivers. Caregivers and receivers are a heterogeneous group with care experiences varying depending on demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic characteristics. Moreover, caregivers and receivers simultaneously belong to multiple social groups: they are women or men of different ages, marital statuses, and ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. This diversity (e.g., low educated Asian female) creates unique social positions, or intersectionalities, that shape care experiences and further contribute to inequalities. By incorporating this intersectional perspective into the Informal Care Model, this research will lead to a novel understanding of care experiences and how these change during crises. Previous research into informal care exchanges has either neglected studying intersections entirely, focused on limited dimensions of diversity, or used qualitative research methods. This research will address this gap, studying intersections between multiple measures of diversity for both caregivers and receivers, using novel quantitative methods quantitative data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study 'Understanding Society'.












MRes in Human Geography/Sustainable Development