Introduction

As we have seen, carers respond very differently to the challenges and demands of caring. Structural factors and external contingencies influence the way caring is experienced and responded to, but the personal dimension has an equally important impact on the way informal care develops over time. It is this dimension that we explore here, drawing out the personal meanings of caring and highlighting their relationship with social dimensions of welfare. We return to the different case studies, considering cases across the three societies and expanding the themes raised in the previous chapters.

The literature of caregiving has not as yet produced a ‘holistic’ model of caring which could satisfactorily theorise its dynamic and multidimensional nature (Nolan et al, 1996, p 2). Rather, research has centred on specific dimensions, such as carers’ experiences, coping, and the emotional and physical consequences of caring (Lewis and Meredith, 1988; Opie, 1994; Twigg and Atkin, 1994; Nolan and Grant, 1993; Willoughby and Keating, 1991).

Issues of process and change in caring relationships have tended to be centred on stages of transition, while temporal and longitudinal aspects remain under-theorised (see for example Wilson, 1989; Nolan et al, 1996). An exception to this is the work by Keady and Nolan (1994); they explored the biographical dimension of caring and identified six distinct phases in the care of long-term dementia patients from a nursing perspective.

Our own approach emphasises the biographical dimension, relating caring to a longitudinal life-course perspective. In this approach, care is a biographical project, in which past life events and experiences, expectations and aspirations for the future, as well as the present circumstances, are formatively involved in the development of informal care. As the case studies presented in the previous three chapters indicate, caring and being a carer is actively negotiated and constantly renegotiated, and carers are active participants in creating their own situations and circumstances.

Three ideas inform our understanding and subsequent analysis of the biographical accounts of carers: biography, trajectory and strategy. Through these concepts we explore caring as a process that is structured both by internal dynamics and by external circumstances.