Seeking Person-Environment Fit in Community Care Placement

Abstract

Large numbers of patients leave mental hospitals to become residents of community-based sheltered-care facilities, yet little is known about how they use particular local environments to satisfy their needs and wants. This paper considers a crucial issue in community care placement, person-environment fit, using survey data from interviews with 397 residents in 211 sheltered-care facilities, drawn from 157 census tracts in California. It studies how individual characteristics interact with eight environmental contexts to influence sheltered-care residents' external social integration. The results underline the power of social norms to determine ex-patient outcomes within specific environments. Ex-patients do relatively better in facility/community environments that allow their independent outreach, and also where they either share personal characteristics with the dominant social group or the dominant group is able to tolerate behavioral differences.

Fig. 1.

Facility type profiles, plotted in standardized factor score units ($\overline{X}=50$, SD = 10). Factor scores are “reflected” so that higher scores indicate more of each characteristic.

Fig. 2.

Community type profiles, plotted in standardized factor score units ($\overline{X}=50$, SD = 10). Factor scores are “reflected” so that higher scores indicate more of each characteristic.