Dimensions of Care Giving and Eldercare Technology in an Aging Society

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The current speed and scale of global aging is unprecedented in human history. By 2050, the proportion of those aged 65 or older within the estimated world population will be nearly 17%, doubling the ratio in 2015 and tripling the percentage back in 1975. Having so many live so long is a fundamentally new phenomenon to humankind. Consequently, we need to reevaluate the infrastructures of eldercare and healthcare. Such a reevaluation would benefit immensely from empirical studies that compare different caregiving options. This project will yield wide-ranging qualitative data by investigating the rapidly shifting landscape of eldercare choices in aging society. Specifically, it focuses on (1) non-familial caregivers while juxtaposing them with (2) the traditional familial care and (3) the emerging care technology. The main questions are: How can the care work provided by non-familial caregivers alter the boundaries of familial, sociological, and national kinship? How do different parties involved in eldercare understand the ramifications of care labor, vis-a-vis other options such as familial care and care provided through artificial intelligence? Not only will the findings of this research be important for the social scientific theories of care, they will also have broader policy implications by advancing our knowledge about the challenges facing social security in the aging world today.The investigator will conduct the research in Japan, the country with the oldest population in the world that is projected to retain this position through at least 2050. Japan is the most appropriate site for this type of study that compares different care options because it has been experimenting with migrant caregivers and care technology ever since the rapid demographic changes destabilized the provision of familial care. For the collection of data pertaining to foreign caregivers, the methods will consist of participant observation, interviews, and demographic surveys. The investigator will conduct additional interviews with family caretakers and carry out participant observation and archival research about care technology to ensure the comparative axis of the methodology. Data analysis will employ the grounded theory approach to find out the culturally significant changes in the views about kinship and eldercare. The existing works on aging and care tend to study different care options separately, in particular familial care and paid care. This study contributes to the anthropological theories of eldercare and kinship by adopting a comparative approach that probes how foreign care workers fare in relation to family caregivers and technological automation of care. The holistic approach to the shifting landscape of eldercare can address the topical and analytical limitations of the current scholarship. Moreover, due to the prominent trend of global population aging today, the findings from the pioneering aging of context of Japan can be extrapolated to countless other countries that face similar demographic challenges, importantly the United States.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.