This book has put forward new theoretical and methodological ideas to evolve understandings of difficulties within informal care relationships, by looking discursively at both sides of the care story. This has resulted in an exploration not of relationships as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but of how language is used to create these categorisations, and value-laden judgments, of care. I have made a case for exploring the complexities of care relationships from both carer and caree perspectives. I have shown the importance of embracing research methods that look beyond the immediate binary distinctions towards seeing care and difficulties as dynamic and complex constructions. Consideration of both sides of the story gives a fuller and richer understanding of the relationship, regarding how accounts are constructed in opposition to each other. From this point, it is possible to theorise what the impact of differing constructions of the relationships with other people might be (for example with social services staff, GPs, friends, neighbours and other people who are aware of, or have some interaction with, the care dyad). This has implications for triadic professional understandings, regarding the ways in which carers and carees talk about how they manage difficulties, which in turn will influence how those practitioners direct the available help in such circumstances.

In looking at the social force of accounts, I have begun to bridge traditionally relativist and realist camps. Rather than following in the footsteps of the majority of current care literature and reporting a realist thematic analysis of what carers and carees talk about, this book moves the debate into looking at the constructions of care and difficulties, reflecting on the personal and ideological impact of those constructions.

Care, stress, difficulties, dependencies, family history, surveillance and identity can all be used to theorise the power of the discursive construction of accounts. I have shown how carers and carees articulate and explain their relationships by adopting a method that highlights the purposes and consequences of the constructed accounts. The use of interpretative repertoires, rhetorical strategies and positioning in participants’ talk opens analytic pathways, for example, to look at the pervasiveness of ‘public discourses’ of care in accounts, and the way that these are employed in talk that challenges, or works alongside, policy aims and objectives.