Family Care Providers

Sources of Role Strain and Its Management

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2346015
AutoresArnold Birenbaum (St. John's University), Mary Ann Re (St. John's University)
Ano1983
Volume4
Fascículo4
Páginas633-658
Data de publicação1983-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Family Issues (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0192-513X • E-ISSN: 1552-5481
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/019251383004004007
OpenAlexW2163892415
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas25

Family care providers for the developmentally disabled, like all role incumbents, must function with some degree of role performance ambiguity, and reconcile different expectations from role partners. Interviews were conducted with 20 caretakers and involved 51 open-ended questions. The discussion of the day-to-day management of this role focused on three inherent difficulties and mechanisms used by incumbents to cope with them: (1) a need to negotiate the altered relationship with the community at large that results from the voluntary assumption of the care of a stigmatized person; (2) the role strains resulting from the adoption of a natural parent analogy, the selection of which is almost inevitable, given the situation of foster care applicants; and (3) the necessity to manage the incompatibility of subordinating parent discretion to agency supervision, by means of redefining relations with the agency in the person of the case manager. The directions in which this conceptualization of the role of the family care provider might take this service are discussed, particularly in the light of other human service occupational ideologies

Ambiguity · Business · Casual · Conceptualization · Discretion · Negotiation · Political science · Public relations · Service provider · Sociology · Child Welfare and Adoption · Family and Disability Support Research · Family Support in Illness · Psychology · Social Psychology · Marketing