Measurement of informal care is problematic for a number of reasons. Caregiving is a complex concept and ontologically vague. Linguistically speaking, ‘care’ can refer to emotions and/or practices and, in common parlance, ‘caregiving’ tends to embody a nebulous set of activities. Informal care is often defined as unpaid, non-contractual or that which happens outside of formal employment, which may seem straightforward, but this can also pose measurement challenges where boundaries of paid/unpaid, job/non-job-related are blurred. In addition to the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes informal care, public perceptions and personal identities shape whether individuals recognise themselves as unpaid carers and/or recipients.
Three different sets of questions were used to identify informal caregivers to identify the best set to use in Understanding Society going forward.
One set of questions was the current Caring module and represents no additional questionnaire time, as it is core content, used as the control set of questions.
Another set was a revised version of the Caring module, with amendments to wording to better reference all types of caring.
The third set was a combination of existing questions in the Disability module and the ADL/IADL questions in the Social Care module. This condition is designed to ask comparable questions of co-residents: recipients and providers. For receipt, individuals would get the ADL/IADL questions if they have any health problems or if aged 65 or over. For provision, individuals would be asked a tailored question on health problems to see if anyone in their household has difficulties. If so, questions follow about what support they give, if any, in terms of ADLS/IADLS. That way the questions on both sides were broadly the same.
The controlling variable, determining which of the three sets of questions respondents received, equally and randomly allocated at the household-level, is on record o_hhsamp_ip:
ff_infcarew15 (1/3 each, allocation stratified by sampleorig ff_incentw15 ff_gridmodew15 ff_mpcduration)
1 = Amended Caring questions
2 = Combining comparable questions
3 = Control
The variables affected by this experiment are in the o_indresp_ip module:
aidhh, aidxhh, naidxhh, aidhu1, aidhu2, aidhrs, aideft, casch, aida, naidxhha, aidhu1a, aidhu2a, aidhrsa, aidefta, cascha, naidxhhb, aidhu1b, aidhu2b, aidhrsb, aideftb, caschb, aidhua1, aidhua2, aidhua3, aidhua4, aidhua5, aidhua6, aidhua7, aidhua8, aidhua9, aidhua10, aidhua11, aidhua12, aidhua13, aidhua14, aidhua15, aidhua16, aidhuaa1, aidhuaa2, aidhuaa3, aidhuaa4, aidhuaa5, aidhuaa6, aidhuaa7, aidhuaa8, aidhuaa9, aidhuaa10, aidhuaa11, aidhuaa12, aidhuaa13, aidhuaa14, aidhuaa15, aidhuaa16, impdishh1, impdishh2, impdishh3, impdishh4, impdishh5, impdishh6, impdishh7, impdishh8, impdishh9, impdishh10, impdishh11, impdishh96, impdishh97, impdiswho1, impdiswho2, impdiswho3, impdiswho4, mpdiswho5, impdiswho6, impdiswho7, impdiswho8, impdiswho9, impdiswho10, impdiswho11, impdiswho12, impdiswho13, impdiswho14, impdiswho15, impdiswho16, caretaskhh1, caretaskhh1_1, caretaskhh1_2, caretaskhh1_3, caretaskhh1_4, caretaskhh1_5, caretaskhh2, caretaskhh2_1, caretaskhh2_2, caretaskhh2_3, caretaskhh2_4, caretaskhh2_5, caretaskhh3, caretaskhh3_1, caretaskhh3_2, caretaskhh3_3, caretaskhh3_4, caretaskhh3_5, caretaskhh4, caretaskhh4_1, caretaskhh4_2, caretaskhh4_3, caretaskhh4_4, caretaskhh4_5, caretaskhh5, caretaskhh5_1, caretaskhh5_2, caretaskhh5_3, caretaskhh5_4, caretaskhh5_5, caretaskhh6, caretaskhh6_1, caretaskhh6_2, caretaskhh6_3, caretaskhh6_4, caretaskhh6_5, caretaskhh7, caretaskhh7_1, caretaskhh7_2, caretaskhh7_3, caretaskhh7_4, caretaskhh7_5, caretaskhh8, caretaskhh8_1 , caretaskhh8_2, caretaskhh8_3, caretaskhh8_4, caretaskhh8_5, caretaskhh9, caretaskhh9_1, caretaskhh9_2, caretaskhh9_3, caretaskhh9_4, caretaskhh9_5, caretaskhh10, caretaskhh10_1, caretaskhh10_2, caretaskhh10_3, caretaskhh10_4, caretaskhh10_5, caretaskhh11, caretaskhh11_1, aretaskhh11_2, caretaskhh11_3, caretaskhh11_4, caretaskhh11_5, caretaskhh12, caretaskhh12_1, caretaskhh12_2, caretaskhh12_3, caretaskhh12_4, caretaskhh12_5, caretaskhh13, caretaskhh13_1, caretaskhh13_2, caretaskhh13_3, caretaskhh13_4, caretaskhh13_5, caretaskhh14, caretaskhh14_1, caretaskhh14_2, caretaskhh14_3, caretaskhh14_4, caretaskhh14_5, caretasknonhh1, caretasknonhh2, caretasknonhh3, caretasknonhh4, caretasknonhh96, caretasknonhh97
