Benefactors and Beneficiaries? Disability and Care to Others
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
| Author | Anna Penner,Carrie L. Shandra |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12401 |
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
C L. S State University of New York at Stony Brook
A P University of California Irvine∗
Benefactors and Beneciaries? Disability and Care
to Others
Individuals with disabilities often have limita-
tions that require care from others to increase
functioning and facilitate activities of daily liv-
ing. Despite these care-receiving needs, evi-
dence suggests people with disabilities are also
care givers. This study uses the 2008–2015
American Time Use Survey to examine the asso-
ciation between the presence of sensory, men-
tal or cognitive, physical, or multiple limitations
and the likelihood and intensity of time spent in
primary child care, secondary child care, adult
care, care of nonhouseholders, and support care
(housework). Net of socioeconomic characteris-
tics, the authors do not observe consistent differ-
ences in predicted child care time by disability
status, although men with disabilities spend less
time in care to adults and nonhouseholders. The
largest difference in predicted care time by dis-
ability status occurs in support care. Overall,the
results challenge the traditional focus on people
with disabilities as only beneciaries of care to
document their role as benefactors.
Most literature on care work and disability in the
United States focuses on people with disabili-
ties as beneciaries of care, as the presence of
Department of Sociology, State Universityof New York at
Stony Brook, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook, NY
11794-4356 (carrie.shandra@stonybrook.edu).
∗Department of Sociology, Universityof California, Irvine,
3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697-5100.
Key Words: caregiving, child care, disabilities, gender,
housework, parents.
a functional limitation often requires inputs to
activities that help increase functioning, facili-
tate activities of daily living, and manage associ-
ated health conditions (Iezzoni & O’Day, 2006).
Furthermore, evidence suggests that the majority
of the care provided to people with disabilities
who live in the community is delivered infor-
mally by family members (Houser, Gibson, &
Redfoot, 2010). Understanding patterns of care-
giving for people with disabilities is crucial for
assessing how to support individuals with lim-
iting conditions as well as the family members
who often provide for them.
However,a growing literature documents how
people with disabilities are also benefactors of
care in multiple capacities. There are millions
of parents with disabilities in the United States
who live with minor children (McNeil, 1993)
and engage in similar child care activities
similar to those of parents without disabilities
(Olkin, Abrams, Preston, & Kirschbaum, 2006).
Likewise, an estimated 38% of informal care-
givers to dependent adults have some sort of
functional limitation (Thorpe, Thorpe, Schulz,
Van Houtven, & Schleiden, 2015). Recently,
time use studies indicate that persons with work
disabilities or functional limitations (Anand &
Ben-Shalom, 2014) and persons who receive
Social Security Disability Insurance (Shandra,
2016) invest nonnegligible amounts of daily
time in care to others. Despite this evidence,
much of the existing literature on care work
focuses on care to people with disabilities (for
reviews, see Drew, 2009; England, 2005), typ-
ically neglecting to acknowledge that people
1160 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (August 2017): 1160–1185
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12401
Disability and Care to Others 1161
with disabilities are often active contributors to
care relationships. Exceptions to this approach
can be found in feminist and disability stud-
ies critiques that problematize the dichotomy
between care and dependency and recognize
the interdependency and reciprocity inherent in
many caring relationships (Barry,1995; Feder &
Kittay, 2002; Thomas, 2007; Walmsley, 1993).
This study adds to our understanding of
care work by shifting the traditional focus on
people with disabilities as beneciaries of care
to examine the extent to which they serve as
benefactors of care. We seek to understand the
multiplicity of contexts in which care work may
be performed; therefore, our analyses consider
care to children, to adult householders, to non-
householders, and support care (housework).
This broad approach to understanding the “care
continuum” (Folbre & Yoon, 2008, p. 32;
Walmsley, 1993) across household structures is
especially important when considering the pop-
ulation of working-aged people with disabilities
because nearly a quarter live alone (Altman &
Blackwell, 2014) and are less likely than those
without disabilities to be married or to live with
household children (Clarke & McKay, 2014).
Our analysis of data from the 2008–2015 Amer-
ican Time Use Survey (ATUS; Hofferth, Flood,
& Sobek, 2015) considers that people with dis-
abilities may allocate care to different recipients
than people without disabilities and extends
existing literature by examining variation across
several types of disability—including sensory
limitations, mental or cognitive limitations,
physical limitations, and multiple limitations.
Results indicate that individuals with disabil-
ities make substantial investments in care to
others, investments that should be more fully
recognized in studies of caregiving.
L R
Conceptualizing Care and Time Spent Caring
Contemporary frameworks of what it means to
provide care draw from a variety of theoretical
perspectives that differ in their focus on the site
of production, caregiver motivation, and types
of beneciaries (Duffy, Albeda, & Hammond,
2013; Folbre, 2006; for a review, see England,
2005). However,they are similar in acknowledg-
ing that care work encompasses an array of activ-
ities. Recent studies of care work conceptualize
these types of activities into three types of work
(Folbre & Wright, 2012; Suh, 2016). Interactive
care involves personal contact between the care
provider and care receiver, including activities
such as physical care, developmental care, and
managerial care. Supervisory care refers to peri-
ods in which the care provider is not engaging in
interactive care, but is on-call to provide inter-
active care if necessary. Support care entails
activities that enable the provision of interactive
care, such as housework, meal preparation, and
managerial tasks. This framework recognizes
that caregiving entails multiple types of invest-
ments that vary in their objectives and in their
intensity.
Analyses that seek to understand these mul-
tiple facets of care work have beneted greatly
from the availability of contemporary time diary
data. Conceptually, time has value as a measure-
ment tool because what a person does, who he
or she does it with, and how long he or she
does it reect patterns in individuals’ lived expe-
riences of daily life. Likewise, time has util-
ity as an indicator of resource scarcity because
it is bounded by the number of hours in the
day and because time allocated to one activ-
ity carries opportunity costs of not engaging in
other activities (e.g., National Research Council,
2005; Williams, Masuda, & Tallis, 2016). Also,
because all minutes of the day must be accounted
for, time use as estimated from time diaries
may be less prone to aggregation bias, social
desirability bias, and recall bias than other data
collection techniques (Bolger, Davis, & Rafael,
2003; Robinson & Godbey, 1999).
Time spent in care work constitutes a signif-
icant portion of many individuals’ daily lives.
This is especially true for parents of cores-
ident children. Folbre and Yoon (2008) esti-
mated that women and men living in house-
holds with children aged 12 or younger spend
an average of 8.8 hours and 5.5 hours (respec-
tively) in all types of child care, per day. Most
time was allocated to supervisory care, includ-
ing time when child care was reported as a
secondary activity and when parents looked
after household children as a primary activity.
Fewer hours were spent in interactive care such
as physical and developmental activities, with
the lowest investments in support care involv-
ing housework completed on behalf of chil-
dren. Subsequent studies demonstrate how these
investments vary according to family context
and family characteristics (Guryan, Hurst, &
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