Her research focuses on the use of informal care and the extent to which the informal caregiver is busy with care. The study reveals that not only do individual factors of the care recipient determine the use of informal care, but also the changing social conditions, the physical functioning of the carer, and the quality of the relationship between caregiver and care recipient. The number of elderly people using informal care was lower at the end of 2010 than in 1992, while the number of elderly people using formal care increased slightly.
Moreover, she shows that the care burden of the informal carer are explained by the needs of care, the amount of hours for caregiving and secondary causes of stress. These mechanisms differ between men and women, however. Prolonged caregiving leads to a higher burden of care, especially for wives. Women report a higher burden, have spouses with greater care needs, provide more hours of care per week, and their burden increases more over time.
In additional, it appears that spousal carers are predominantly the sole givers of care. The care burden on these primary carers could be reduced by encouraging carers to share responsibilities, which could make the sharing of care more accepted and more readily available.
