Carolyn Norris-Baker

From our town' to ghost town'?: the changing context of home for rural elders

This research, grounded in a contextual view of environmental stress, employed an experiential field approach to explore outcomes of the continuing rural crisis of the past decade for elderly residents of four small Kansas towns. These rural changes threaten the survival of many towns, and affect their elderly residents, who often have enduring economic, social, and psychological investments in their homes and communities. At the same time, changes associated with aging may lead to transitions in the experience of home and community for these elderly individuals, regardless of the towns health. The two sources of change may have multi-faceted impacts on the well-being of the elderly individuals who experience them. Aspects of the research described here focus on environmental stressors related to housing and the meaning of attachment to home within economically-threatened communities. Some findings presented support previous research, while others reflect the regions unique socio-historical environment as a part of the Western Frontier. Implications for policy alternatives and the well-being of rural elderly are discussed.

Place therapies for older adults: conceptual and interventive approaches.

The study of place transitions—moves between places as well as changes occurring in environments of elders who age in place—is a relatively new, diverse research area of high relevance for adult developmentalists and gerontologists. This article explores the usefulness of a tractable model of environmental stress and proposes three potential “place therapies” that may minimize the negative impacts of place transitions upon older adults. Specifically, a transactional model of environmental stress linked to behavior setting theory is proposed for understanding both positive and negative outcomes associated with different kinds of place transitions. Three distinct “place therapies” are considered as interventions that may hold promise for preventing, ameliorating, and enriching the diverse impacts of place transitions on older adults and their environmental milieu.

Many Meanings of Community

Abstract Powell Lawtons theoretical and empirical work greatly increased understanding of communities as contexts for successful aging. This article illustrates the direct and indirect contributions of Lawtons work for multiple meanings of community at the physical, personal, suprapersonal, and social environmental levels. This includes the ETA (Ecological Theory of Aging) and its value as an empirical and practical tool for understanding environmental coping among old community residents; his seminal work on community planning; emotion as a determinant, moderator, and outcome of environmental adjustment, place identity, and place attachment in community settings; and his novel use of the dimension of time in community studies. We share some personal memories of the range and impact of Lawtons work and advice on our own community level research.

Aging on the Old Frontier and the New A Behavior Setting Approach to the Declining Small Towns of the Midwest

Roger Barker identified three life-shaping characteristics of the American Frontier and its settings—being unfinished (lacking many physical-social structures), being undermanned, and being imbued with uncertainty, with conditions that were poorly understood or unknown to the residents. Today, dramatic changes in the social and economic landscape of the rural Midwest that threaten the survival of many small communities and their behavior settings have created circumstances not unlike those of the 1800s, except that many of the pioneers are elderly. This research uses an experiential field approach to explore the applicability and impacts of Barker’s frontier conditions to the behavior settings that comprise three small Kansas communities today and the historical context from which they have evolved. The implications for the future of these communities and their residents, as well as the potential for intervention within existing behavior settings, are discussed.

Assessing Special Care Units for Dementia

Although much effort has been devoted to developing conceptually based approaches for measuring environment, tools for assessing physical environments remain relatively underdeveloped, and instruments to assess environments designed to care for people with dementia reflect this situation. The Professional Environmental Assessment Protocol (PEAP) has been developed to provide a standardized method of expert evaluation of special care units (SCUs) for people with dementing illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. Although the primary focus of the PEAP is the physical setting, the assessment is conducted within an understanding of the larger context of the social, organizational, and policy environment. This chapter reviews the conceptual and methodological foundations of the PEAP, describes its scales, provides information about its reliability, and illustrates its applications in comparing settings and in monitoring change within a single specialized care setting.

Evaluating the cancer education program: Examining a range of approaches

The objectives of this article are to provide people who are responsible for cancer education programs with a broadened perspective of the rich array of evaluation strategies available and responsive to the evaluation needs of cancer education programs, and to summarize selected literature resources useful for the development of an evaluation plan. This article reviews limitations found in previous evaluations of medical education programs and provides a descriptive survey of diverse strategies for the evaluation of cancer education programs. The characteristics, requirements, utility, audience, constraints, and resources are presented. Two cancer related case studies are discussed in detail as illustrations of the diversity of strategies available to evaluate cancer education programs.

The Environmental Context of Poverty Among Older Residents of Economically Endangered Kansas Towns

This article reports results of a field study of the impact of acute and chronic economic stressors on elderly residents of four economically threatened small towns in Kansas. Guided by a conceptual model of environmental stress, risks and benefits associated with everyday life m these towns for older residents are explored for four issues: health risks, the health/housing dialectic, maintaining psychological control, and risks to community identity. Psychological and behavioral strategies employed by older residents as well as communities to deal with changes in these areas are illustrated. It is suggested that community intervention models (e.g., community development, empowerment, triage, or hospice) attempting to stabilize, rejuvenate, or resurrect economically endangered towns must consider a variety of context-specific needs and resources within and between communities. Recommendations for intervention are offeredfor rural practitioners (health professionals, community planners, housing experts) and policymakers.

Time budget methods for behavioral community psychology

Obtaining reliable and cost-efficient data on everyday behavior occurring in community settings presents a formidable problem for behavioral community psychologists. This article (a) describes a set of methods, called time budgets, for recording sequences of everyday behaviors and their social and physical contexts; (b) discusses the quality of data yielded by these methods; and (c) illustrates their utility for behavioral community psychology. Time budgets meet important criteria for behavioral assessment in community settings by permitting direct assessments of ecobehavioral systems at various levels of social organization. Data from these methods can be used in diagnosing problems, planning interventions, and evaluating outcomes. An application of time budgets in research on the elderly is presented to illustrate one use of the method. Time budgets provide a dependable, flexible, and cost-efficient alternative to naturalistic observation for many assessment situations in behavioral community psychology.

Habituation theory and environment-aging research: ennui to joie de vivre?

Robert Kastenbaum posits that functional aging results in the overadaptation to our own routines and expectations, producing “hyperhabituation,” mental stagnation, and novaphobic response orientations. This article examines the promise and implications of this notion for two areas of environment-aging research: psychological control and environmental comprehension. Possible causal and mediating links between control and habituation are considered, as well as the impact of habituation on environmental perception, cognition, and appraisal. Personal and situational characteristics of older people likely to be at risk for habituated responses are suggested. The article also speculates about individually- and environmentally-targeted interventions which might prevent and/or ameliorate tendencies toward hyperhabituated responses among older people who reside in highly ritualized and constant environments such as long-term care institutions. Interventions subject to future evaluations include modifications for the social, physical, and policy milieux and desensitization of novaphobic responses.

Understudied Older Populations and Settings in Environmental Gerontology: Candidates for Future Research

Environmental gerontologists from several disciplines focus on an overarching primary goal: to discover and apply information about person–environment transactions to produce more sanguine relationships between older adults and the environments they inhabit. As we move into the second decade of the 21st century, it is appropriate to conduct a roll-call of populations of older individuals who deserve but have not yet received adequate empirical attention. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we contrast benefits derived from an environmental gerontology of the usual with those associated from conducting research on understudied populations and their environmental contexts. We also offer reasons that may explain why environmental gerontology has not placed the study of these older individuals and settings more prominently on the empirical radar screen. Second, we present two understudied subpopulations of elders living in voluntarily and involuntarily selected environments—older male and female prisoners and older residents of declining and dying small rural towns. We provide some examples of issues and research questions of potential relevance to environmental gerontologists who may be interested in entering each of these venues.