For many years there has been an underlying pathology within the literature about families with children and adults with intellectual disabilities (Helff & Glidden, 1998). This literature has emphasized stress and burden, incapacity and dependency, leading to negative stereotyping of families in this context. Over the last 2 decades research has led to some important reconceptualizations of how families approach their caring, affording an improved understanding of how they deploy strengths and resources, and who benefits. This paper reviews this thinking, arguing that it provides a suitable context for understanding the scope and form of family caregiving contributions that are less visible, and therefore less recognized. An attempt is therefore made to chart invisible contributions. It is suggested that invisible contributions have implications for thinking about human and social capital (Putnam, 2000) as well as for practice in supporting families.

This study advances the understanding of family caregiving by examining the relationship between adult children caregivers and their helpers. Specifically, it focuses on examining “who helps whom” and extends analyses beyond the dyadic focus of caregiving in later life. The focus on helping and caregiving addresses the variety of contributions and responsibilities involving not only the caregiver who was the target respondent in this research, but also others identified as helpers in the provision of care.

The data for this study are derived from the Work and Eldercare Research group of CARNET: The Canadian Aging Research Network. Secondary analysis of CARNET data focuses on data collected from 250 individuals with significant caregiving responsibilities for at least one older person. Findings extend Kahn & Antonucci's convoys of social support model (1981) and Cantor's model of social care (1991) by disentangling some of the dimensions of helping and caregiving, such as the distinction between direct and assistive help.

Every public-policy problem can be defined in terms of its empirical (“facts”) and normative (“values”) dimensions and the interrelationship between them. An understanding of the connection between facts and values at the foundation of the home care policy debate in the Canadian health-care system is developed through the application of an analytical framework based on the concept of “narrative frame” analysis. The literature on home care policy reports and recommendations is examined within this conceptual structure – including especially publications and reports from the federal government, national organizations, and the aging and disability communities. Finally, observations and conclusions about the significance of home care policy discourse, and of the differences between the aging and disability constituencies in this debate, are offered as a guide for deconstructing the public-policy process.

The paper discusses two reforms in Ontario's long-term care. The first is the commercialization of home care as a result of the implementation of a “managed competition” delivery model. The second is the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care's privileging of “health care” over “social care” through changes to which types of home care and home support services receive public funding. It addresses the effects of these reforms on the state–non-profit relationship, and the shifting balance between public funding of health and social care. At a program level, and with few exceptions, homemaking services have been cut from home care, and home support services are more medicalized. With these changes, growing numbers of people no longer eligible to receive publicly funded home care services look for other alternatives: they draw available resources from home support, they draw on family and friend networks, they hire privately and pay out of pocket, they leave home and enter an institution, or they do without.

In many countries one approach to supporting family-and-friend caregivers is direct financial or monetary support. Debates about the benefits and consequences of such policies pervade the literature. Building on the premise that values underlie public policy, the paper examines four policy paradoxes in the literature and uses selected examples from an international policy analysis to illustrate the underlying objectives and values upon which many of the policies were developed. These include the responsibility to care, economic or social objectives, gender equity, and the autonomy of care receivers. The authors conclude that policy makers need to be cautious about the unintended effects of financial support policy and develop a menu of policies and services to support caregivers. Future policy development in Canada must enable legitimate choice across the life course and ensure that neither the caregiver nor the care receiver will experience short- or long-term financial consequences of his or her choice.

Although family scholars conceptualize caregiving in terms of networks of carers, little attention has been given to equity within these groups. Siblings comprise a prevalent caregiving network of members who feel responsible for parent care, expect to share these responsibilities with each other, and look to each other to evaluate the fairness of their sharing. In this paper, a multidisciplinary approach is used to examine sibling views of equity in relation to disputes over giving parent care and receiving parent assets. A literary perspective is offered through analysis of stepsibling tensions depicted in the novel Family Matters. Real life disputes among biological siblings that have been pursued through the courts are also examined. Issues arising from these examples are then analysed through the lens of legal doctrines of equity. Siblings evaluating fairness undertake careful comparisons of their respective relationships with parents in terms of biological links to parents and type and extent of influence in interactions with parents.

This article offers reflection on the validity of relational data such as used in social network analysis. Ongoing research on the transformation of the support network of caregivers of persons with an Alzheimer-type disease provides the data to fuel the debate on the validity of participant report. More specifically, we sought to understand the factors that might influence the description of the support network by persons involved in caregiving. The issue warrants special attention, given that social relations – in their form and their content – constitute the raw material of network analysis. We propose that how persons describe their social network corresponds to a subjective process that rests, in part, on their representation of their cultural and social universe.

This article examines the struggle to win lifetime eligibility for selected home care benefits provided through the Veterans Independence Program (VIP) for veterans' widows in recognition of their years of unpaid caregiving – a policy change eventually implemented between 2003 and 2004. It explores how arguments on their behalf shifted from discourses of dependency, cost-saving, and compassion to ones of entitlement and commemoration between 1981 and 2004 as the large cohort of Second World War veterans and their wives moved towards the end of their lives. This policy victory for veterans' widows marked a historic shift in mandate for Veterans Affairs Canada and an important recognition by the state of unpaid caregiving as a form of national service. If Canadians are to learn from this example, however, it must be through seeing all caregiving labour – not just that of veterans' wives – as equally heroic and worthy of compensation.

The growth of research knowledge on culturally diverse family caregivers for the aging population lags behind the increase of culturally diverse populations in Canada. This study examines the effects of culture, as manifested through cultural variables, on the caregiving burden of family caregivers in a Chinese-Canadian community. A random sample of 339 Chinese-Canadian caregivers for elderly relatives completed a telephone survey. Results of hierarchical stepwise multiple regression analysis reported the predicting effects of culture-related variables on caregiving burden. The findings indicated that being an immigrant, having a Western or non-Western religion as compared to having no religion, and having a lower level of filial piety, predicted a higher level of caregiving burden. Chinese tradition does not exempt the caregivers from being burdened. Policies and practices should address the needs of family caregivers according to the intra-cultural variations identified in this study.

This paper reports on the results of analyses using administrative data from British Columbia for 10 years from fiscal 1987/1988 to 1996/1997, inclusive, to examine the comparative costs to government of long-term home care and residential care services. The analyses used administrative data for hospital care, physician care, drugs, and home care and residential long-term care. Direct comparisons for cost and utilization data were possible, as the same care-level classification system is used in BC for home care and residential care clients. Given significant changes in the type and/or level of care of clients over time, a full-time equivalent client strategy was used to maximize the accuracy of comparisons. The findings suggest that, in general, home care can be a lower-cost alternative to residential care for clients with similar care needs. The difference in costs between home care and residential care services narrows considerably for those who change their type and/or level of care, and home care was found to be more costly than long-term institutional care for home care clients who died. The findings from this study indicate that with the appropriate substitution for residential care services, in a planned and targeted manner, home care services can be a lower-cost alternative to residential long-term care in integrated systems of care delivery that include both sets of services.