[Partnership in the context of care dependency]

Partners are one of the largest groups of caring relatives in Germany and are therefore very important for the maintenance of the German care system. For this reason, this article deals with coping with care situations in partnerships as well as with resources and ambivalences.

The background to this article is the project "Care in the neighborhood" (PiQ). This study investigated the question of how the various home care settings of older people are organized and what problems and needs become visible in the process. This article focuses on caregiving for partners.

Based on a case contrastive evaluation of guideline-supported individual and couple interviews, strategies of the couples for coping with the care situation were reconstructed. In addition to the interviews the analysis of egocentric network cards showed the problem areas and resources of the couples RESULTS: The caring partners in this sample showed different strategies for maintaining the relationship. In addition, there were ambivalences with respect to assumed and often exclusively positively connoted resources of the support network.

This article highlights the special situation of caring partners. Based on the findings implications for the practice and (local) care policy are derived for improving the situation of older caregiving partners and thus their respective living conditions.