The description of a new tool for determining the effect of the built environment of residential care facilities on their residents, developed by Susan Rodiek, associate director of the Center for Health Systems & Design at Texas A&M University, won an award for best research paper from Seniors Housing & Care Journal.
Rodiek, assistant professor of architecture at Texas A&M and holder of the Ronald L. Skaggs Endowed Professorship in Health Facilities Design, responded to a need, identified by researcher L.J. Cutler, for tools to objectively capture detail about the built environment’s effect on residents at residential care facilities.
She donated the $5,000 award for the paper, “A New Tool for Evaluating Senior Living Environments,” to the Design for Aging scholarship fund offered through College of Architecture’s Center for Health Systems & Design. Each year, CHSD awards a $1000 competitive scholarship from the fund to a student engaged in research and/or design on housing for older adults.
The instrument Rodiek developed focused on the psychosocial needs of older adults and what their built environment allows them to do, and at what level — in other words, “the extent to which the physical environment supports their specific behaviors and activities,” she wrote in her paper.
Rodiek’s paper detailed “an in-depth review of the residential care facility literature that compared relevant design principles from a variety of published sources, primarily design practitioners, care providers, and gerontologists concerned with the physical environment.”
She found seven distinct areas of interaction between residents and the built environment that consistently appeared in the sources she surveyed:
Rodiek then developed subcategories in these areas, based on how often they were mentioned in the literature, to arrive at a 63-item instrument to objectively evaluate senior living environments.
Research assistants traveled to facilities in Houston, Chicago and Seattle to perform surveys.
In each city, Rodiek wrote in her abstract, study sites were randomly selected from all facilities with assisted living resident capacity of 50 or greater, within a two-hour driving diameter of the city’s urban core.
“A team of four trained research assistants,” she continued, “traveled to each facility to complete the environmental assessments and conduct surveys with residents and staff, who had been recruited directly by facility administrators. While two assistants evaluated the most heavily used outdoor areas at each facility (typically two-to-three spaces per facility), a second pair of researchers helped residents fill out survey forms
as needed.”
