Premium
Caregiving as a Cultural System: Conceptions of Filial Obligation and Parental Dependency in Urban America
Author(s) -
Albert Steven M.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1990.92.2.02a00040
Subject(s) - obligation , dependency (uml) , ethnography , interpretation (philosophy) , psychology , social psychology , developmental psychology , context (archaeology) , sociology , anthropology , law , political science , history , linguistics , philosophy , systems engineering , archaeology , engineering
Verbal reports were elicited from 70 caregivers rendering care to impaired parents. Despite great empirical variety in the caregiving context, caregivers showed a striking commonality of interpretation with respect to attitudes about parental dependency and the obligation to care for a parent. In fact, ideas about dependency and obligation covary in predictable ways. Content analysis of the verbal reports and additional ethnographic data show that the association of these two sets of ideas represents shared knowledge in a culture of caregiving. Ideas about dependency and obligation “go together,” even for caregivers whose situations vary radically. While a minority of caregivers deviate from this consensus, they do not represent an alternative culture, but rather cases where the history of parent‐child relations leads them to interpret dependency and obligation more variably.