A Care Regime Typology of Elder, Long-Term Care Institutions

European Journal of Ageing 2025 (22): 20. DOI.: 10.1007/s10433-025-00854-0

Maike van Damme¹, Jeroen Spijker¹, and Dimitris Pavlopoulos²
Corresponding author: Maike van Damme Email: mvandamme@ced.uab.es; maikevd2011@gmail.com
¹ Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED-CERCA) Carrer de Ca n'Altayó, Edifici E2 Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 08193 Bellaterra / Barcelona, Spain
² Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) Faculty of Social Sciences De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Abstract

This study generates a classification of 26 European OECD countries with respect to care regimes. Care regimes are ‘social joins’ on the nexus between the state and the family, grouping countries into ‘types’ that have similar characteristics with respect to state care institutions. The latter are formal arrangements by the state to unburden citizen’s care responsibilities either financially, in kind, or both. We build upon the literature on the dimensions of defamilialisation and familialism and empirically test how these two dimensions indicate different types of care regimes. We expect to find at least three different regime types that combine either high reliance on defamilialisation or on supported familialism, or the lack of both. We collected macro-data of 26 countries on five indicators of elder care institutions from various sources and subsequently performed Latent Profile Analysis to group these countries into classes of similar state care arrangements. The results reveal three care regime types: ‘strong Defamilialisation/Supported Familialism’; ‘moderate Defamilialisation/Supported Familialism’; and ‘Familialism-by-Default’. This classification contributes to developing a theoretical framework of care institutions and can guide other scholars in understanding contextual differences in socio-economic causes and consequences of elder care in Europe.

Keywords

Care regimes; Child care; Elder Care; Institutions; Latent Profile Analysis; Typology

Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the EUROCARE project (Ref.: PCI2021-121983) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the EU Joint Programming Initiative-More Years Better Life (JPI-MYBL), the European Research Council (ERC-2019-COG-864616, HEALIN) and the CERCA Programme (Generalitat de Catalunya).

Results

We accidentally coded several missing values as 0 in our data for the following countries: Belgium (LTC workers), Iceland (LTC workers), Lithuania (LTC workers), Switzerland (residential care and home care services).
We redid the Latent Profile Analyses, which slightly changed the classification with Iceland now being classified as ‘strong Defamilialisation/Supported Familialism’ instead of ‘moderate Defamilialisation/Supported Familialism’.

Below we include the corrected Tables of the article: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-025-00854-0
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