Necesidades de los hombres frente a cuidados de larga duración de sus parejas con esclerosis múltiple: los casos de Finlandia, Austria y España

The role of men as carers of dependent people has been omitted or relegated to second place in the body of research devoted to care. Women have been the main protagonist in the provision of care in the family. In the recent years, studies on male involvement in care and tasks traditionally performed by women have also conducted. This article explores the men’s experiences from Lapland in Finland, Vorarlberg in Austria and Alicante in Spain, when their wives need long term care due to Multiple Sclerosis disease. These experiences have been analyzed under the gender perspective, with attention to the influence of contextual factors in each case. Gender relations, such as power, emotion, symbolism and production (Connell, 2002) and interactional individual and institutional perspectives (Stoller, 2002) have been used as reference for the analysis. The results of this study offer the possibility of approaching the experiences that men live with the long-term care situations of their wives, showing the influence of contextual factors, such as the different social protection systems that they since a gender perspective.