A significant proportion of social welfare production takes place as unpaid private care work in the household, primarily performed by women. However, this form of social division of labor is coming under increasing pressure as a result of women’s increased focus on employment, demographic changes and the dismantling of social security systems. Outsourcing care and household work to third parties for remuneration is increasingly seen by politicians and the public as a solution to the resulting conflicts of compatibility. However, the specific demand behavior for such services has hardly been systematically investigated nationally and internationally. The few existing programs of study are dominated on the one hand by quantitative economic approaches, which, however, show inconsistent findings and fall short from a sociological perspective, and on the other hand by qualitative studies informed by cultural sociology, which in turn provide relevant but only limited generalizable insights.
The aim of the project is therefore the systematic theoretical and empirical-quantitative analysis of the development and determinants of demand for household-related and family support services in Germany and in international comparison, taking into account decidedly sociological perspectives. The central thesis is that, in addition to the time and budget constraints emphasized in economic programs of study, other determining factors that have hardly been taken into account make a significant contribution to the explanation.
Firstly, this includes socio-cultural mission statements on privacy, family and gender that are closely linked to household activities. Secondly, from an economic-sociological perspective, it is deduced that quality and trust issues associated with economic exchange relationships play a central role in the acceptance and use of services. Thirdly, institutional and welfare state framework conditions are important determinants of households’ decisions to share and outsource work.
The empirical implementation is carried out using advanced regression methods and draws on national and international secondary data sets that record the use of childcare, domestic help, elderly care, food-away-from-home and repairs. In addition, it draws on a primary survey already conducted as part of the pairfam relationship and family panel, which allows the new cultural and economic sociological considerations to be examined.
The project not only provides comprehensive insights into the multi-layered determinants of demand and the scope of any new social care arrangements, but also provides information on the relevance of cultural framings for economic processes and social inequality dynamics resulting from the different use of services
