Background to the Research

• In recent years many of the changes in welfare provision have centred around the idea of community care. The research sought to explore the nature of care provided by family and neighbours in a working class community in West Belfast. It also sought to examine the ability of these sources of care to form the basis for community care.
  

Research Approach

• A survey of one-in-four households in the area provided a sample of 150 households.
  

Main Findings

Profile of the Sample

• The majority of men and women in the survey had no access to formal employment. There were high levels of poverty and a heavy reliance on social security benefits.
• Seventy-eight per cent of the sample were related to other households within the estate, women tended to have more relations on the estate than males.
• Fifty per cent of the men aged between 26-40 years were born within the estate, while 72% of the women in the same age range were born there.
• Eight-six per cent of males and 90% of females reported that most of their friends came from the estate.

Support from Neighbours

• More women than men reported giving and receiving help during a crisis.
• In the case of bereavement, neighbours and relatives could be relied on to provide short-term emotional and practical support. The street collection of money to help the family and other forms of practical and emotional support were mainly carried out by female members of the estate.
• Short-term and limited support could also be relied on during periods of illness, though this help was largely confined to acute illness rather than chronic illness and was usually carried out by females.
• Women with husbands in hospital were given minor help with shopping and childcare, whereas men with wives in hospital were given more wide-ranging help including cleaning and washing.
• In general, help from neighbours tended to be piecemeal and immediate, long-term assistance was less common and tended to be linked to kinship obligations.
• Assistance with childcare centred around neighbours, friends and relatives helping each other out, in order that mothers could carry out caring duties for adult relatives. Those women in work tended to work part-time in jobs with unsociable hours, combing their childcare duties and employment with minimal assistance from their husbands.

Support between Kin

• In the study the most prominent support relationships existed between parents and children. Middle-aged mothers tended to instigate most aid obligations and these were focused towards married daughters or daughters who were unmarried mothers.
• Some married daughters continued to live in the parental home and where married daughters moved out they often continued to lived in the estate, sometimes in the same street or a few streets away.
• Mothers and daughters shopped for each other and mothers often minded grandchildren. Emotional and financial support were often exchanged, with the flow mainly coming from mothers to daughters. Financial help was more frequent where the son-in-law was unemployed.

Support for the Elderly

• Women were the main providers of the kinship structure, there was a bias towards contact with the woman's side of the family. Most contact occurred between elderly women living alone and their married daughters. Daughters shopped and did the laundry and gave financial support to their elderly mothers.

Motivations for Providing Support

• Men in the survey sought to enhance their male identity through their friendships with other men of the same age on the estate, whom they met often in pubs and clubs. Women's friends tended to be home-based and comprised of relatives and neighbours and spanned the generations.
• Male help outside the household tended to be gender-specific and based on the obligation to give and expect to receive at another time. Women tended to be less aware of the extent of the support they provided to others, caring and sharing was perceived by many women as part of their natural role.

Caring for and Caring about

• The survey showed that whilst the men cared about their children and relatives, their caring and support outside the household was set in the context of women appearing to be content to take on board caring responsibilities.

Labour and Love

• Men in the survey tended to perform tasks such as decorating, fixing electrical appliances, car maintenance; these, and a host of other similar tasks, are visible and more easily defined as labour. Women tended to perform more invisible tasks such as housework and cooking, knitting and dressmaking and childcare on a daily basis.
• In the survey the tasks performed by women tended to form an extension of their mother-housewife role and were strongly influenced by norms concerning the role of women in society. Men tended to perform tasks where there was a clear expectation and likelihood of a task being performed in return. Women performed more tasks for people with whom they had a prior relationship and where there was less expectation of reciprocity. However, across the generations, daughters who helped their mothers could in return expect to receive help from their mothers later on.

Conclusions

• Whilst helping networks were prevalent in the community under study, there is little evidence to suggest that these networks could be used to carry out the care of heavily dependent people. Help was usually piecemeal and temporary and covered short-term emergencies.
• Most care in the study was carried out by women providing support to daughters in the early years of their marriage/childrearing and daughters giving support to their elderly mothers. Neighbours tended to provide mundane favours in the short-term, rather than being a source of consistent effective support.
• The study demonstrates that those who have never married, have married and never had children or who's children are not living nearby, are the most vulnerable members of the community.
• The informal helping networks that exist in the estate reinforced and extended gender divisions within the family and community. Whilst many women in the study found their caring role fulfilling, their role is undervalued by many men and by the state.