Publication details
Worker and carer – two conflicted roles of active agers
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The increase of older workers´ employment rate has been one of the pivotal measures of population ageing in the European Union. Within the Europe 2020 strategy, the Czech Republic set a national partial target to have the employment rate of older workers (55-64 years old) 55 %. It is a part of the joint EU target to have 75 % of people aged 20-64 at work. The employment rate of older workers was 58.5 % in 2016 (Source: Eurostat) and is quite high in the long-term view. Although some EU documents have a broader view on the population ageing issue, their aim is overwhelmingly to extend working lives of older people. It represents a very flattened view of the active ageing concept, originally defined by the World Health Organisation in 2002. The WHO defined active ageing more broadly as participation in society, not only as its productive activities. However, the current young-old perform many other important social roles, not only their workers´ roles. Besides their roles of active leisurers trying to enjoy their free time and self-development, they are in the roles of volunteers and carers. The young-old have to care for their parents, spouses and grandchildren in many cases. Grand-parenting is a typical social role of the young-old across the whole Europe, helping parents, (especially) mothers, to reconcile work and family life. The increasing longevity causes more often situations when parents of the young-old are still alive and as the oldest-old often in need. The role of a carer for a person in need is not as frequent as a grand-parental role. In our survey only 14 % of women and 6 % of men care in this way. Almost 3/4 of them feel role overload. A half of these carers are economic active people. The carers take care very intensively, 53 % every day and 38 % more times a week. On average, carers provide their help about 30 hours per week regardless of gender. Majority of them perceive this help as quite or very demanding. They develop different strategies to cope with all these demands. These key strategies of the young-old to deal with the role overload are the main aim of this presentation. Besides that, it focuses on the importance that the young-old place on their particular roles and their combination. These issues are answered using survey and in-depth interviews with the Czech 50-70-year-old young-old. The paper is based on mixed methods. It utilised two sources of data, from the survey (N = 730) and in-depth interviews with 30 communication partners from the research project “Role overload: Grandparents in the Era of Active Ageing” (GA13-34958S). The survey analysis focuses on the module devoted to the caring role and economic role and variables indicating the risk of role overload. The in-depth interviews are analysed in the spirit of grounded theory starting with repeated reading of transcribed interviews and continuing with open and initial coding. About a half of respondents feel the role overload and what is mainly to blame is employment, which is time demanding and only rarely part-time. The caring role is often added to the previous scope of roles resulting in the feeling of stress, necessity of new temporal and spatial organisation and postponing of leisure and other family roles. |
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