Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

The co-habitation guarantee in Swedish eldercare involves the right of older couples to cohabit in assisted living facilities even if only one of them has the need for residential care. Assisted living residences are sites for advanced care. However, when an apartment in the facility becomes a home for a couple, there is a boundary-crossing of care practices in the domestic sphere and sphere of formal care. This study is based on a qualitative research project involving participant observations and 32 interviews with couples and staff in five assisted living residences in Sweden. Previous analysis showed that although the weight of care responsibility is on the staff, the accompanying spouse’s caregiving career continues. This review focuses on apparent differences in the caregiving expectations by staff, where negotiation of care responsibility may be gendered. Both accompanying wives and husbands were very involved in caregiving before the transition to residential care. However, the accompanying wives expressed struggling more than the husbands in finding and delimiting their new caregiver role in relation to the staff. The staff also more clearly expressed the need to support the accompanying husbands in the family carer role in the facility. Keeping in mind that the study is based on a small number of cases, these results, based on coding and constant comparison of the couple- and staff interviews, are nevertheless striking and show how the caregiver role is negotiated.