Capturing the Spatial Relatedness of Long-Distance Caregiving: A Mixed-Methods Approach.

Tatjana Fischer,Markus Jobst

doi:10.3390/ijerph17176406

Abstract

Long-distance caregiving (LDC) is an issue of growing importance in the context of assessing the future of elder care and the maintenance of health and well-being of both the cared-for persons and the long-distance caregivers. Uncertainty in the international discussion relates to the relevance of spatially related aspects referring to the burdens of the long-distance caregiver and their (longer-term) willingness and ability to provide care for their elderly relatives. This paper is the result of a first attempt to operationalize and comprehensively analyze the spatial relatedness of long-distance caregiving against the background of the international literature by combining a longitudinal single case study of long-distance caregiving person and semantic hierarchies. In the cooperation of spatial sciences and geoinformatics an analysis grid based on a graph-theoretical model was developed. The elaborated conceptual framework should stimulate a more detailed and precise interdisciplinary discussion on the spatial relatedness of long-distance caregiving and, thus, is open for further refinement in order to become a decision-support tool for policy-makers responsible for social and elder care and health promotion. Moreover, it may serve as a starting point for the development of a method for the numerical determination of the long-distance caregivers on different spatial reference scales.

Highlights

In many regions of the world demographic dynamics and unbalanced care support rates lead to new challenges in caregiving for the elderly in rural as well as in urban areas [1]
Based on the roughness of internationally reported cross-sectional empirical findings, this paper aims to conceptualize the spatial relatedness of Long-distance caregiving (LDC) from an interdisciplinary spatial research perspective, namely spatial planning and geo-informatics, applying a mixed-methods approach combining single-case evidence with graph theory
An ontological research approach was chosen for the analytical conceptualization and modeling ontological research approach was chosen conceptual for the analytical conceptualization and modeling of theAn spatial relatedness of LDC

Summary

Introduction

In many regions of the world demographic dynamics and unbalanced care support rates lead to new challenges in caregiving for the elderly in rural as well as in urban areas [1]. The quality of intergenerational caregiving on the basis of adult children and ageing parents depends on geographical proximity and shifts to the center of the debate on the maintenance of informal domestic caregiving and the appropriateness and necessity for adaption of current (elder) care and health (support) infrastructures, both for the cared-for persons themselves and their caregiving relatives [2,3]. With regard to the latter target group, the so-called long-distance caregivers already receive special attention in the context of the protection of well-being and health promotion by the social and health sciences. Public Health 2020, 17, 6406; doi:10.3390/ijerph17176406 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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