「I’m not a cleaning lady!」:An interpretive interactionism study of The Taipei Home Care Workers

• Main Authors: Yi-Hsiu Lee, 李宜修
• Other Authors: Tzen-Yung Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/19691307822599522335

碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 衛生福利研究所 === 96 === The aim of this study is to explore the subjective interpretation between the home care workers’ life experience and home care work with the interpretive interactionism approach which is developed by Denzin(1989). I captured three experienced home care workers’ life stories and tried to identify the major turning points from their life stories under the broader social context. Three women in home care work involved in this study. The in-depth interview method is adopted to collect data, and interpretive interactionism method as my framework is used to do data analysis. The four dimensions of their subjective experiences are included: their family life experience, their marriage ,their on-the-job working experience, and the experience of being home care worker. The results of this research are following: 1. The poverty and inequity of gender are main factors that make these women in an inferior position of the labour market. These women’s career are more interrupted than men by their sacrifice to family and the social expectation of their motherhoods, which results in less accumulated working experiences. The women with low educational level and low skills could only enter the secondary labour market and do the low skill jobs. Home care work is one of the better jobs that these women can choose in the inferior employment opportunities. 2. These women identify themselves as helpers, junior generations, and professional workers when they provide home care service to the disabled elderly. (1) Helpers: The women’s stories show that they take the home care work not only a job, but also a mutual help among people. (2) Junior generations: The women reverse the lower social status of the home care work by identifying themselves as junior generations to these elderly who receive the home care service. Furthermore, by identifying themselves as junior generations, they successfully convert the poor women image that the poor women have to do the lower jobs just for making money. They also break the gaps of the different gender between the recipients and service providers. (3) Professional workers: They think that every elderly is unique. So that makes the workers have to use different working techniques and working knowledge to meet the needs and demands from clients in the caring process. 3. They try their best to maintain the caring relationships with the clients on the basis of mutual trusts when they enter the formal caring system and provide paid caring services, Therefore they can feel the positive feedback from the elderly whom they care of. And they can reframe their value in doing home care work.. The conclusion of this study shows that the design of the community caring policy with the lower caring costs that underestimate the value of those home care work. These women’s invisible works in the caring process are excluded from counting the cost of caring work such as building the mutual trust relationship with the elderly, employing the different techniques and knowledge to complete their service, and providing the elderly emotional supports. These women’s work should be visible and get the reasonable workfare as feedback to maintain the qualities of home care service.