Adjusting paid jobs to informal caregiving: a qualitative study in the Netherlands

Increasingly many individuals are expected to combine informal caregiving with paid jobs. We assume that individuals may aim for reconciliation of both by engaging in job crafting, which concerns making adjustments to tasks, relations and cognitions regarding their jobs. This research note presents a qualitative study that aims to explore the experiences of individuals who combine informal caregiving with paid work, with respect to how they craft their jobs because of caregiving. Informal caregivers (19 individuals) were interviewed. After reading the interview transcripts, a preliminary coding tree was entered into NVivo 12. Iterations of examining its fit with the data, adapting and re-examining resulted in the final coding tree. Informal caregivers reported: seeking recognition and understanding by workplace stakeholders (relational crafting), adjusting work schedules, environments and tasks on a day-to-day basis (which includes task and cognitive crafting), preventing a work overload (this covers task and relational crafting) and focusing on how paid work and informal care can reinforce each other (this includes cognitive crafting). The results suggest that individuals use job crafting to combine caregiving and work. As such, job crafting by informal caregivers needs attention of researchers to investigate its preconditions and outcomes.