Eastern European live-in carers in domestic care triads for people with dementia: Informal care concepts, communicative power and care responsibilities (acronym TriaDe)

• Applicants: Milena von Kutzleben, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Jo Reichertz; Professor Dr. Mark Schweda
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509885213

In Germany, the majority of people with dementia lives in private households. However, the scope of benefits provided by the German statutory long-term care insurance is hardly sufficient to cover the comprehensive care needs of people with dementia. The resulting care gap is compensated by informal caregivers. One answer to this gap are migrant caregivers who live with the person in need for care for a limited period of time: so-called live-in carers, who mostly come from Eastern European countries.There is a lack of empirical evidence and ethical insight on how the persons involved organize their everyday life in the context of intransparent organizational and legal frameworks, how they interpret and negotiate their coexistence and identity with each other, and what role dementia plays in this setting. Our interdisciplinary project addresses this research desideratum. The subject of the research project is the triad consisting of the person with dementia, the rela-tives and changing live-in carers. The aim is to reconstruct the communication processes and interaction dynamics on the basis of which the care arrangements in which a person with dementia is cared for by an Eastern European live-in carer are shaped by the participants in eve-ryday life. We will combine perspectives from sociology, health services research and ethics. The theoretical concepts that guide the study and at the same time define the respective perspectives of the three areas of work involved are the informal care concepts to which the actors in the triad implicitly and explicitly orient themselves, the communicative power that must be continuously negotiated in the triad, and the attribution and negotiation of care responsibili-ties in this constellation. These three perspectives are closely interrelated in terms of content and can at most be analytically separated from one another: Patterns of interpretation of dementia and good care in dementia, maintenance and change of communication power and the moral perspective as well as intersecting social categories become relevant in all three areas of work. Therefore, the research questions will be reflected on continuously across the three perspectives and the results of the analysis will be integrated.The study is designed as an ethnographic field study and will accompany eight triads over a period of twelve months in the microsetting of the home care arrangement. The fieldwork will be accompanied by analyses of organizational and legal framework as well as pertinent media discourses. During the field visits, participant observation, conversations/interviews, video analysis and dementia care mapping (DCM) will be used. Data analysis mainly uses reconstructive methodology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Lena Ansmann; Dr. Merle Weßel