From a Bird's Eye View: Whole Social Networks in Adult Day Care Centers and Continuing Care Retirement Communities

Abstract

Background and objectives: The present study describes whole social networks in 4 adult day care centers (ADCCs) and 4 continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) in Israel.

Method: Each respondent received a list of names of all individuals receiving services in the respective ADCC or CCRC and was asked to indicate whom he/she knows from the list. We derived whole social network properties and used hierarchical cluster analysis to group network settings. We further examined the ability of the social network data to classify respondents as members of either an ADCC or a CCRC.

Results: Many social network properties were more favorable in CCRCs than in ADCCs. A striking finding of the present study is that one can classify with a relatively high degree of accuracy a respondent as belonging to an ADCC or a CCRC, simply based on his or her social properties (specifically, number of people who know the participant and are known by the participant).

Implications: Despite some similarities between CCRCs and ADCCs, CCRCs likely allow for more inclusive and active social relations. This information should be valuable to administrators and care providers.

Keywords: Egocentric; Long-term care; Social network analysis; Sociocentric.

Figure 1.

The social network map in each of the continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) and adult day care centers (ADCCs). Note: Dots represent an individual person, lines represent ties between individuals, and arrows represent the direction of the ties.

Figure 2.

In- and out-degree distributions of each of the site. Note: The Y-axis represents the probability density; the X-axis represents the degree distribution. Dark represents the in-degree distribution; light represents the out-degree distribution.

Figure 3.

Results of cluster analysis to classify sites by network properties. Note: Network properties used to classify the settings: in-degree—number of people who know the respondent, out-degree—number of people known by the respondent, degree correlation—the correlation between in-degree and out-degree; higher values indicate those who are well known also know more people, density—number of actual ties out of all possible ties, reciprocity—the likelihood of actors (i.e., nodes) in a directed network to be mutually linked (e.g., A knows B and A is also known by B), components—a proportion of the network that includes a path between each pair of individuals, isolates—number of individuals who have no outgoing or ingoing ties in the network; continuing care retirement communities: AG, MF, BY, MJ; adult day care centers: BG, BM, KS, BH.