Telling Stories of Care-Giving: An Introduction to a Biographical Approach to Understanding Caring

As Chapter 1 has demonstrated, there is a substantial body of research on care and care-giving. Much of this research has focused on what constitutes care in terms of the work involved. This was intended to make visible the level of unpaid input being provided by family members in order to reveal the assumptions on which community care policy has been based. It has had a valuable impact both in the development of support services for carers, and in achieving recognition for the knowledge they bring. But it has also arguably contributed to the development of a ‘them and us’ position between carers and disabled people through positioning care receivers as ‘dependent burdens’ on carers, and constructing carers as ‘tragic heroines’ carrying the moral weight of society’s obligations to its needy members. In this chapter I reflect on the value of adopting a life-story approach as a means of understanding the experience of caring in the context of individual and shared lives.