Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
The objectives of the study were: to establish whether self-funded people who are admitted to residential care differ significantly in terms of financial assets and informal support from elderly people in private households; to establish the extent to which self-financed residents are admitted at levels of dependency that might have been maintained in the community; to investigate the process of admission and whether those people with lower levels of dependency are admitted through choice or lack of access to appropriate alternatives; to investigate factors associated with the choice of home; identify the level of receipt of non-means tested benefits; and to estimate expected length of stay of self-funded residents.
Main Topics:
The dataset contains data from a survey of care home managers, and from a survey of relatives or other contacts of residents of care homes, where these were available. The home managers provided information about the home on the Home Manager Questionnaire and about recently-admitted residents on the Resident Questionnaire. The relatives/other contacts provided information about the same residents on the Family/Friend Questionnaire. The dataset consists of two SPSS data files, relating to the Home Manager Questionnaire and to the Resident and Family/Friend questionnaires. Each data file contains a complete set of variables from the respective questionnaires, with the exception of variables identifying the address of individual residents, together with derived variables. In particular, where no relative or other contact could be identified, home managers were asked, where possible, to supply additional information on the resident’s financial circumstances, corresponding to the information on the Family/Friend Questionnaire. Composite derived variables were computed using the data from the Family/Friend Questionnaire, where available, or from the data supplied by the home managers. Standard measures of resident dependency were computed from the resident-level data: the Barthel Index of Activities of Daily Living (Royal College of Physicians and British Geriatrics Society, Standardised Assessment Scales for Elderly People, Royal College of Physicians of London, London, 1992); and the Minimum Data Set Cognitive Performance Scale (Morris, J.N., Fries, B.E., Mehr, D.R., Hawes, C., Phillips, C., Mor, V. and Lipsitz, L.A., MDS Cognitive Performance Scale, Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, 1994, 49(4), M174-M182). The measure of social care outcome for older people (SCOOP) developed by Netten and her colleagues was computed from the Family/Friend Questionnaire data (Netten, A., Ryan, M., Smith, P., Skatun, D., Healey, A., Knapp, M. and Wykes, T., The Development of a Measure of Social Care Outcome for Older People, PSSRU Discussion Paper No. 1690/2, Personal Social Services Research Unit, 2002). (Note that the final version of the measure is the Older People's Utility Scale for Social Care (OPUS).) Wenger's Support Network Typology (Wenger, G.C., Help in Old Age – Facing up to Change: A Longitudinal Network Study, Institute of Human Ageing, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1992) was used to classify the informal care network of residents using Wenger and Scott's Support Network Type Algorithm version 1.2 ((c) G. Clare Wenger and Anne Scott 1994, 1996, Centre for Social Policy Research and Development, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd, UK, LL57 2DG).
Multi-stage stratified random sample
Systematic selection of local authority groups listed geographically; systematic selection of homes
Face-to-face interview
Telephone interview
Postal survey
Telephone interview for initial screening; postal survey for some Family/Friend Questionnaires
