Evaluating consumer satisfaction in residential continuing care settings

The outcome of the project reported on here is a client-centered consumer satisfaction questionnaire designed to evaluate new models of residential continuing care in Alberta, Canada. Satisfaction is defined as a multi-dimensional construct that is grounded in the consumer's experience. Consultation with the clients of the services during development of the instrument ensured that characteristics important to the clients were assessed. The result is an instrument with which to measure satisfaction that is fully client-centered and that, with appropriate modifications, can be used to monitor any client-centered program for cognitively-able continuing care clients.     

Test for cointegration based on two-stage least squares

A residual-based test for cointegration is proposed. The method of two-stage least squares is used to estimate the cointegration model parameters. The residuals are then tested for the existence of a unit root using the augmented Dickey-Fuller test.     

Special Needs,Relationship Type and Distributive Justice Norms in Early and Later Years of Middle Childhood

Sensitivity to relationship type and level of need in distributing rewards for work done was investigated with classmates who were best friends, acquaintances, or children with special educational needs (SEN). Children (N = 142) aged 8–11 years completed measures of reward allocation, monitoring of task inputs and belief in a just world (BJW). An increase in children's sensitivity to relationship type and need was found with age in reward allocation and monitoring of task inputs. Among older children, BJW varied with relationship type and monitoring of task inputs. Findings support the characterization of relationships with acquaintances as exchange relationships, with best friends as symmetrical communal relationships, and with children who have SEN as asymmetrical communal relationships.     

“Taking Back a Little Bit of Control”: Managing the Contaminated Body Through Consumption

In this article, we explore the lived experience of avoiding environmental chemicals through safer consumption, such as buying “eco‐friendly” products. Using focus groups and in‐depth interviews involving 50 subjects, we investigate how individuals become aware of environmental chemicals and how they adapt to this awareness. Our participants describe being surprised or alarmed to learn that chemicals are present in food and commodities that they believed were safe. They respond by developing a set of heuristics rendering the “dangerous” consumer landscape into a space that is amenable to personal control. They learn to read an ingredient label and look for organic certification seals on product packaging. We develop the idea of the “contingent boundary” to describe how participants perceive personal control as uneven: they believe they can activate a protective boundary in local and familiar contexts, but outside these contexts, they believe the boundary dissolves. They accept this contingency as normal and describe having to ignore some chemical exposures, for fear of becoming too “crazy.” We conclude that the individuals in our study accept that inverted quarantine (Szasz 2007) is out of reach, and instead try to impose order upon a ubiquitous risk.     

Cheaper for whom? Costs experienced by formal caregivers in adult family living programs

A current emphasis in Canadian public policy is on community care for frail seniors. Such care is viewed as attractive in part because public costs are lower than for traditional nursing home care. Adult Family Living (AFL) is seen as an exemplar of this community focus. Data from a multi-model evaluation of residential continuing care in western Canada are used to show that while AFL programs have lower public costs than nursing homes, AFL caregivers incur high levels of economic and non-economic costs. We address the question of the sustainability of this approach to community-based residential care in light of the apparent transfer of public costs to AFL caregivers.     

The Hidden Costs of Informal Elder Care

Demographic, socio-economic, and political trends throughout the developed world have contrived to make elder care an issue of utmost policy importance. They also have led to sharp reductions in health and social program expenditures. Policymakers are looking to communities to help meet growing care needs because community care is believed to be better and cheaper than institutional care. However, these beliefs become untenable when costs beyond public sector costs are considered. In fact, informal care carries a number of hidden costs that seldom are considered in health and social policy discussions. This article introduces a taxonomy of the costs of informal elder care, which can be categorized as out-of-pocket expenditures, foregone employment opportunities, unpaid labor, and emotional, physical and social well-being costs. Then, an illustration is provided regarding how the taxonomy can be applied to understanding the incidence, magnitude, and distribution of these costs among stakeholder groups. This taxonomy can help inform ongoing debate about health and social policy reform.     

Getting Into It: Farm Roles and Careers of New Zealand Women1

Abstract Researchers have challenged the stereotype that farm women's roles and influence are primarily domestic by documenting the number of women's on-farm roles. This study extends this approach by considering the interrelationships among women's roles and influence in reproductive and productive domains. A qualitative research method was used to investigate women's ways of describing the range of their on-farm roles and the process of entry into and exit from those roles. Participants were farm women from south island, New Zealand. Findings showed women's wide range of involvement in household and farm labor, management, and ownership of their farms. Levels of involvement differed throughout the three phases of their farm careers: making a place, getting into it, retirement. Hypotheses were developed from the findings for further delineation of the range of women's on-farm involvement and barriers and opportunities to the development of women's on-farm careers.     

Retirement and Productive Activity in Later Life

It is commonly believed that as people age and leave the labor force, they disengage from productive activity and become dependent. While consistent with the conventional economic view of what constitutes productive activity, this belief is inconsistent with a more contemporary view that unpaid work (domestic, volunteer, and caring work) is equally economically valuable (i.e., productive). We investigate differences in how people allocate time among productive and other activities pre- and post-retirement. Results indicate that people remain engaged in productive activities even as they move out of the labor force, substituting unpaid for paid work. Only respondents who have exceeded their normal life expectancy greatly reduce their productive activity. Evidence suggests a need to revisit assumptions underlying policy debate on population aging.

Synchronization of Nonverbal Behaviors in Detecting Mediated and Non-mediated Deception

Videoconferencing (VC) is changing the way people communicate in a variety of fields including education, medicine, business, and even interpersonal relationships. In this study, we investigate the effects of the modality of communication, whether through face-to-face (FtF) or VC, on the ability of interactants to develop and maintain nonverbal synchrony. This study is an analysis of 101 interviews between students and professional interviewers in which some of the participants were induced to cheat on a task with a confederate. The results revealed that the VC modality hampered the interactional synchrony of the dyads, especially during the phases of questioning when suspicion-inducing or accusatory questioning was used. For global ratings of synchrony, the greatest impact of modality was for participants whose lies were not sanctioned by the interviewer, suggesting that the VC modality negatively affected the most skilled deceivers. In addition, interactional synchrony improved in the final, accusatory, phase of the interview when subjects confessed, particularly in the FtF modality. The effects of the interviewer and the question type are also discussed.