Family care across diverse cultures: Re-envisioning using a transnational lens

• Published in: Journal of aging studies 2020-12, Vol.55, p.100892-100892, Article 100892
• Main Authors: Andruske, Cynthia Lee, O'Connor, Deborah
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Culture; Ethics of care; Family care; Flow of care; Technology; Transnational aging
• ISSN: 0890-4065; 1879-193X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2020.100892

In an increasingly globalized world, the importance of developing a more culturally complex understanding of family care has been clearly identified. This study explored family care across three different cultural groups - Chinese, South Asian, and Latin American - living in a metropolitan, Pacific-West, Canadian city. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 29 family members from one of the three family groups exploring how they practiced ‘care’ for their aging, often frail, relatives. The importance of conceptualizing family care as a transnational, collective undertaking emerged from the outset as critical for understanding care practices in all three cultural communities. Three themes identified contributed to this conceptualization: the need to broaden the understanding of family care; the centrality of geographic mobility, and the need to rethink the location of aging and consider its relationship to mobility; and the use of technology by extended family networks to facilitate continuity and connection. An over-riding notion of ‘flow’ or fluid movement, rather than a fixed, static arrangement, emerged as critical for understanding family care. This perspective challenges the dominant approach to studying family care in gerontology that generally conceptualizes family care practice as one local primary caregiver, often female, with some support from other family members. Understanding family care from a transnational lens builds support for the importance of a feminist Ethics of Care lens and has important implications for policy and service delivery practices. •This qualitative study explored roles and cultural family care practices through interviews of 29 ethnic carers in Canada.•Two bodies of literature, gerontological and transnational, broaden the definition of ethnic caregiving for older adults.•‘Aging -across-place’ provides a framework for understanding care practice and developing services attuned to family mobility.•Technology facilitated shared care, responsibility, continuity, connectivity, and proximity among kin and friend networks.•Family care emerged clearly as a transnational, collective undertaking transcending geographical boundaries.