Publication Date

8-1-1995

Degree Program

Department of Psychology

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

Adult day care is a new and rapidly growing alternative to long term care for the burgeoning population of frail and disabled elderly. A review of the literature regarding adult day care services revealed a limited number of studies addressing client satisfaction. The current study of 68 participants of nine Kentucky adult day health and social model adult day care centers assessed client satisfaction with services and explored variables related to satisfaction. It was hypothesized that clients who preferred to be at the adult day care center rather than in another location would report higher levels of satisfaction with services than clients who preferred to be elsewhere during the day. It was also hypothesized that clients who perceived themselves as having autonomy in their daily center activities would report higher levels of satisfaction than clients perceiving themselves to have little autonomy at the center. A third hypothesis predicted that client demographic predictors of satisfaction would be similar to those reported by Weissert et al. (1990). Due to the uniformly high level of satisfaction, the hypotheses could not be evaluated. The author did, however, explore the explanation that social desirability contributed to the lack of response variability. A social desirability questionnaire was administered to a subset of clients. The clients in this subset scored high on social desirability items. Given these results, it is possible that measures of client satisfaction with adult day care services are influenced by clients' desire to respond in a socially acceptable manner. Social response set should be taken into consideration when designing or interpreting satisfaction survey data with this population. Clients' responses were more variable on a life satisfaction question and to items addressing perceived autonomy in center activities. Explanations for this variability were explored.

Disciplines

Psychology

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