Abstract:

There is strong empirical evidence to support the influence of environmental and social factors in health and behavior among the institutionalized elderly. In order to assess personal and environmental relationships, 32 residential centers for the elderly and 1403 of their inhabitants were assessed using the Sistema de Evaluación de Residencias de Ancianos (SERA). Our principal findings were as follows: (1) relationships between individual variables (e.g. objective and subjective health, depression) and subjective variables (e.g. satisfaction); (2) the predictive power of the environment characteristics (e.g. policy choice) on the subjects functioning (e.g. level of activity); (3) residential satisfaction is the product of several personal variables (e.g. objective and perceived health), as well as of social environmental factors (e.g. physical comfort); and (4) very weak relationships were found between social climate dimensions and other environmental factors.