Determinants of the Social Environments of Sheltered Care Settings

A conceptualframework is used to examine the relation of the social environments of sheltered care settings to the type of setting and three other sets of environmental domains: physical and architecturalfeatures, organizational policies and programs, and aggregafe resident and staff characteristics. The framework is illustrated with data from 90 sheltered care facilities. The relative importance of each set of variables as predictors of seven dimensions of the social environment is estimated using multiple regression and partitioning of the explained variance. The results show that: (a) variables from all four sets are related to the social environment, (b) architectural and policy features have the strongest unique effects on social environments, and (c) a substantial portion of the explained variance is shared among combinations of two or more sets of predictors. The findings underscore the utility of focusing on several domains of environmental variables in evaluating sheltered care settings for the elderly.