Consensus and conflict in families taking care of seniors

Abstract

The authors deal with the inter-generation solidarity under conditions of taking care of seniors who are not self-sufficient. They were particularly focused on studying one aspect of the family solidarity concept: solidarity of agreement. They tried to combine conflict and consensual attitudes to this problem and thus to characterize the nature of conflicts and harmony in families taking care of seniors. The target of the study was mapping of relationships between the life harmony and manifested conflicts between persons providing and accepting the care and finding differences in this field between families taking care of seniors under different conditions. After presenting basic terms, outlining the research targets and introducing the theoretical background, the authors present results of their empiric sociological research. Standardized interviews were performed with 405 respondents taking care of their own aging parents or aging parents of their partners. In the section Results, a general relationship between the degree of harmony and conflicts in the families inquired is first described and the families are subsequently compared depending on the method of taking care of the senior. For the comparison, families taking care of seniors at home, families taking care of seniors in a separate household and families transferring the senior to the institutional care were differentiated from each other. The results indicate that there are differences in the degree and nature of conflicts depending on different types of the family arrangement. Typology of families was established to facilitate the description of relationships between the concepts of the consent, conflict and method of taking the care. The results demonstrated that it is impossible to idealize the solidarity in families taking care of seniors in their own households and indicated requirements for supplementing the model of the family solidarity by an investigation of conflicts. During this, they may not behave as a barrier in the family solidarity, but they may rather serve as an indicator of the interest and mutual dependence reducing the personal autonomy.