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Contact: Professor Gillian Parker
Tel. (0116) 252 5422
Fax. (0116) 252 5423
Email gmp3@le.ac.uk
The proportion of frail, elderly people in the population who are likely to need social care has risen sharply over recent years and will increase further into the next century. Government policy emphasizes individual and family responsibility for the provision of such care. The trend towards a reduction in family size together with the continued movement of women into paid employment may limit the supply of voluntary care through the family. Individuals will be increasingly expected to provide for their own care should they be unable to look after themselves in old age. However, little is known about people's attitudes towards saving or insuring for their own care, or indeed their ability to do so. This project will provide information about both these areas.
The research will be carried out in two stages. First, a large national survey will explore attitudes towards the increased use of personal financial resources to secure care in old age and how these attitudes vary by age, position in the family life-cycle, sex and current financial circumstances. This information will then be used to examine the factors that influence different attitudes towards providing for one's own needs.
In the second stage a smaller scale, more in-depth survey will explore the relationship between the attitudes identified in the first stage and present, planned and anticipated financial behaviour in relation to savings or insurance for care in old age. The ways in which committing resources for this purpose might affect current spending and influence feelings about responsibility for care between generations will also be examined in the survey.
The research has an important practical bearing on social policy planning for the needs of an ageing population. It is also relevant to the development of health and social care insurance. From a broader perspective, the work will cast light on the extent to which changes in social policy provision have altered people's ideas about their citizenship and the balance between the state and private sector in the provision of social services.
GILLIAN PARKER is Nuffield Professor of Community Care and Director of the Nuffield Community Care Studies Unit at the University of Leicester. She has published a large number of books and reports on informal care and on the domestic management of finance, including With This Body: Caring, Disability and Marriage, (Open University Press, 1993).
JEREMY JONES is Lecturer in Health Economics, Nuffield Community Care Studies Unit, at the University of Leicester.