Hidden Carers by Joyce Cavaye is a slim volume that focuses on the results of a qualitative longitudinal study of 26 carers in Scotland who were providing more than 20-hours per week of care and were not in receipt of services. Carers of dementia sufferers were not included. The book starts with a brief review of policy in Scotland, with some comparisons with England and Wales, Germany and Denmark. There is some discussion of the evolution of the term ‘carer’ in both policy documents and general usage and the role of pressure groups in achieving recognition of carers and the care-giving role. This is useful, as most studies of care-giving rely on people identifying themselves as carers, something clearly dependent to some extent on conceptualisation and identification of this role. Findings are discussed and presented in terms of stages of the care-giver role, from becoming a carer to the ending of this role with intermediate phases sometimes involving acceptance of services. An underlying theme is the reluctance of carers to accept support because they perceive service providers as authoritarian and intrusive. The failure of formal service providers to either offer a ‘choice’ about assumption of the care-giver role or to recognise and work in partnership with care-givers, for example when drawing up hospital discharge plans, are discussed. Aspects of caring which participants in the study found most difficult, such as the provision of intimate care, especially across gender lines, are documented as well as the important difference that carers felt arose regarding the location of care. The book also deals to some extent with the skills and stratagems that carers acquired and used. Particularly on this topic, more extensive quotations from the primary material might have been helpful.

Working Couples Caring for Children and Aging Parents: Effects on Work and Well-being by Margaret Neal and Leslie Hammer deals with the issue of ‘sandwiched’ couples. The book reports result from a longitudinal study of middle- and upper-income couples who had a co-resident child aged under 18 and who provided at least three hours per week of care to an elderly parent or parent-in-law. Both couple members were in paid-work. The definition of ‘carer’ used is thus much broader than in the Cavaye study. The geographic locus of the United States is also different and the scope of the book wider and deeper. Neal and Hammer include chapters which detail the evolution of workplace and government initiatives affecting work and family life (apparently Hallmark Cards was the first employer to introduce an elder-care programme) and with the literature on role conflict, role enhancement and health and wellbeing outcomes. Their methodology was also more complex involving rounds of focus-group discussions and different sampling methods. The main sample used was recruited through telephone screening interviews with a sample of households that were composed of one or more adults aged 30–60 years. The focus on better-off dual-earner families is explained as being a requirement of the funder (the Alfred P Sloan Foundation). Both spouses in the eventual sample were included in the study.

The main account of the research also includes discussion of the respondents' strategies for managing their multiple commitments. This information was collected by including 36 statements in the questionnaires, all derived following reviews of the literature, focus-group discussions and pre-testing. Complex issues dealing with role quality and work-family ‘spillover’ effects – both positive and negative – are dealt with. The main conclusions of the study indeed emphasise the importance of ‘role quality’, for example the quality of marital relationships, rather than just number of roles or role demands. Both these books make useful contributions, although of rather different types. The short Cavaye volume is a quick read and provides a useful background, probably especially for those interested in Scotland, as well as some valuable illustrative material. The Neal and Hammer volume is much more challenging, not just because of its length but also the complexity of the issues and analyses. As such it is likely to be more attractive to researchers than to policy or practitioner audiences. The results may not be generalisable to the UK population (and of course ‘sandwiched’ carers are a relatively small sub-group of the whole carer population), but the exploration of how work and family roles interact at the individual and family level, and the consequences for health and wellbeing, will be of interest to specialists in the field.