Gerdt Sundström

With studies in Sociology and a doctorate in Social Work, Gerdt Sundström began to work at the Institute of Gerontology in 1985. There he does teaching and research, as he did before at the School of Social Work in Stockholm. His main area of interest is formal and informal care and the balance between what the state and the family are doing for older people. This has produced a number of studies, most of them on care in the community.
Some of these studies represent initiatives that have received funding from research foundations and others are commissioned work for government agencies. For example, Socialstyrelsen (the National Board of Health and Welfare) has funded a number of studies, among them two national surveys of living conditions and care for persons 75+ living in the community in 1994 and 2000. Usually these studies are co-authored with colleagues at the Institute of Gerontology or other academic institutions.
Recurrent themes in these studies are historical perspectives and international comparisons concerning both family care and public services for old people. This has entailed collaboration with researchers in the Nordic countries and in England, France, Israel, Japan, Spain, The United States and other countries. There is a good deal of international interest in Swedish welfare and also how it fares in today´s sterner financial climate. It appears that public services — so far — manage their tasks rather well, but it is also found that informal care — mostly family based — is extensive and seems to be growing, in response to cutbacks in state care.
In recent years Gerdt has continued work with colleagues on informal care and its relationship with demographic factors. Care — given and received — is conditioned by long term changes in the population — primarily if people have partners and/or children - which we rarely reflect upon. Empirical studies of family care and support to family carers commissioned by Socialstyrelsen belong to this theme. 
Cooperation between family care and public services — or lack of it — and market alternatives are analyzed in international comparisons. Gerdt believes it is instructive to juxtapose Sweden with Spain, which has a different social structure but is now expanding her social services very rapidly and has good data on them and the population.
In this vein Gerdt has also studied religiosity among older Spaniards and Swedes, perceived loneliness — much higher in Spain — and shifts in family structure. Also among older people, in the Nordic countries and in Spain, do we now find increasing cohabitation and divorces, but new marriages as well. At the same time, more (older) people stay married to the same person, manifest as an avalanche of golden weddings. Proportionally fewer older persons live alone - internationally unique - and they have today more extensive family ties than just some 30-40 years ago. More of them live with a partner, more have children, more have both, and increasingly have their children in the vicinity.