Care in Times of Crises: an intersectional approach to socio-economic inequalities in giving and receiving informal care during the COVID-19 and cost-

非正式照顾者--向因残疾或年老等原因需要帮助的个人提供无偿帮助的人--在向有需要的人提供卫生和社会护理方面发挥着至关重要的作用。新冠肺炎给社会生活带来了前所未有的变化，包括非正式护理网络。研究将大流行与不断变化的护理经验联系在一起，这暴露了护理人员之间的不平等和护理接受者的脆弱性。新出现的生活成本危机可能会加剧这些问题，因为福利供应被切断，正规护理服务变得负担不起，对非正规护理的需求大幅增加。对于77%的非正式护理人员来说，不断上涨的生活成本是他们预计在未来一年面临的主要挑战之一。虽然一些护理人员可以将护理与有偿工作结合起来，护理接受者可以负担得起额外的护理费用，但另一些人则不能。这些预先存在的不平等意味着个人不会经历非正式的护理交流，他们的经济福祉也不会受到同样程度的影响，这意味着不平等可能会扩大或新发展。该项目将促进对英国健康和社会经济危机时期非正式护理交流的了解。它对知识的贡献有三个方面。首先，它采取双重视角，关注照顾者和接受者。其次，它采用纵向方法来了解当前的照料和接受模式，承认先前的轨迹在护理的性质、强度和频率方面的差异，以及这些变化可能受到不断变化的社会经济情景的不同影响的方式。第三，它通过采用一种新的交叉性视角，考察照顾者的不平等和照顾者的脆弱性的多个维度，以及它们如何结合在一起产生累积(分散)优势，从而加强了对护理交换中的不平等的理解。为了做到这一点，该项目将把非正式护理模式(Broese van Groenou和Boer，2016)与克伦肖的交叉性范式结合起来，为照顾者和接受者提供对非正式护理中不平等的维度及其交叉点的新见解。照顾者和接受者是一个不同的群体，他们的护理经历因人口统计、社会经济和地理特征而异。此外，照顾者和接受者同时属于多个社会群体：他们是年龄、婚姻状况、种族、文化和社会经济背景不同的女性或男性。这种多样性(例如，受教育程度较低的亚裔女性)创造了独特的社会地位或交叉性，塑造了护理经验，并进一步加剧了不平等。通过将这一交叉视角纳入非正式护理模式，本研究将导致对护理经历以及这些经历在危机期间如何变化的新的理解。以前对非正式护理交流的研究要么完全忽视了对交叉点的研究，要么专注于多样性的有限维度，要么使用了定性的研究方法。这项研究将解决这一差距，使用新的量化方法研究照顾者和接受者的多种多样性衡量标准之间的交叉点，量化数据来自英国家庭纵向研究“理解社会”。人文地理学/可持续发展硕士

Informal carers - those who provide unpaid help to individuals who need support for a range of reasons, such as disability or old age - play a vital role in delivering health and social care to those in need. COVID-19 brought unprecedented changes to social life, including to informal care networks. Studies have linked the pandemic to changing care experiences which exposed inequalities between caregivers and the vulnerabilities of care-recipients. The emerging cost-of-living crisis is likely to exacerbate these, as welfare provisions become severed, and formal care services become less affordable, the demand for informal care increases considerably. For 77% of informal carers the rising cost-of-living is one of the main challenges they expect to face in the coming year. Whilst some caregivers can combine caring with paid work, and care-receivers can afford the additional cost of care, others cannot. These pre-existing inequalities mean that individuals do not experience informal care exchanges and their economic wellbeing repercussions to the same extent, meaning inequalities can widen or newly develop. This project will advance understanding of informal care exchanges during times of health and socio-economic crises in the UK. Its contribution to knowledge is three-fold. Firstly, it takes a dual perspective, by focusing on caregivers and receivers. Secondly, it adopts a longitudinal approach to understand current patterns of caregiving and receiving, by acknowledging differences in prior trajectories with respect to the nature, intensity, and frequency of care, and the way these might be affected differently by the changing socio-economic scenario. Thirdly, it enhances understanding of inequalities in care exchanges through adopting a novel intersectionality lens, looking at multiple dimensions of inequalities of caregivers and vulnerabilities of care-receivers, and how they combine to produce cumulative (dis)advantages. In order to do so this project will integrate the Informal Care Model (Broese van Groenou and Boer, 2016) with Crenshaw's intersectionality paradigm providing new insights into dimensions of inequalities and their intersections in informal care, for both caregivers and receivers. Caregivers and receivers are a heterogeneous group with care experiences varying depending on demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic characteristics. Moreover, caregivers and receivers simultaneously belong to multiple social groups: they are women or men of different ages, marital statuses, and ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. This diversity (e.g., low educated Asian female) creates unique social positions, or intersectionalities, that shape care experiences and further contribute to inequalities. By incorporating this intersectional perspective into the Informal Care Model, this research will lead to a novel understanding of care experiences and how these change during crises. Previous research into informal care exchanges has either neglected studying intersections entirely, focused on limited dimensions of diversity, or used qualitative research methods. This research will address this gap, studying intersections between multiple measures of diversity for both caregivers and receivers, using novel quantitative methods quantitative data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study 'Understanding Society'. MRes in Human Geography/Sustainable Development