Care tasks and mental health
Type of research: mixed-method
Description:
Care tasks can be summarized as activities necessary for maintaining personal wellbeing, managing daily life or maintaining basic needs (e.g., doing laundry, taking a shower). These activities could be related to self-care or taking care of someone else such as a child or a pet. There is a bidirectional relationship between care tasks and mental health: 1) For some people struggling with mental health, these tasks can be neglected, and the reduced quality of life can exacerbate mental health problems. 2) For other people, trying to keep up with care tasks, especially the care of others, could be overwhelming, affecting their mental wellbeing. Support with care tasks therefore could therefore increase mental wellbeing and/or reduce mental illness.
This study is inspired by KC Davis’s compassion-based work called Struggle Care (https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-care). KC Davis offers many strategies on social media (mainly TikTok) for neurodivergent people and other people who struggle with care tasks based on the premise of “care tasks are morally neutral.” The aim of this study will be to explore empirical support for this approach, informed by a wide range of work, from feminist health research to media psychology. The assignment is flexible and open for students to develop their own research questions. Research questions can focus on certain mental health issues (e.g., ADHD) or specific online spaces (e.g., Instagram). The assignment may involve conducting interviews with people who struggle with care tasks, text mining (e.g., analyzing Struggle Care posts) or conducting a quantitative survey on the attitudes towards care tasks.