SAFE HOUSES: MEANING OF HOME MODIFICATIONS AS SELF CARE

描述（改编自研究者摘要）：本项目的目标是 更好地了解老年人如何理解安全教育材料， 决定是否对房屋进行与安全相关的改造 环境.现有的关于减少家庭危险的研究表明， 在许多老年人的家中，即使在 安全教育试图提高对家庭危险的认识，相对较少 人们采取行动，使家庭修改，以减少风险。的差异 家庭危险的专业评估和 老年人自身和风险知识与风险之间的差距 缓解可以通过将风险理解为社会风险来部分解释。 而不仅仅是个人。我们建议开发和测试一种文化上的 风险识别、评估和应对的基础社会模型。的 社会模型包括理解过去和现在的事件如何相互作用 与当代背景下老年人对家庭安全的评价。 拟议的研究将作为一个“自然实验”进行定性研究 利用已经开展的公共卫生工作来识别、描述和 分析：（a）老年人对家庭等关键概念的含义 安全风险和变化，（B）其他人的故事和信息的作用 在朋友之间通过决定作出或不作出改变，（三）地方 社会界限和社会等级的变化， （d）安全教育过程的方法 有助于老年人做出家庭改造的决定。研究 将在四个经济和种族多样化的社区进行， 西海岸的一个大城市，其目标是确定沿着 社会经济地位、年龄、性别和种族/文化群体与解释有关 风险，安全，以及愿意进行家庭改造。

Description (adapted from investigator's abstract): The goal of this project is to better understand how older people interpret safety education materials and decide to make or not make safety related modifications to their home environments. Existing research on home hazard reductions indicates that there are significant hazards in the homes of a great many older people, even after safety education attempts to increase awareness of home hazards, relatively few people act to make home modifications to decrease risk. The discrepancies between professional assessments of home hazards and the assessments of the older person herself or himself and the gap between knowledge of risk and risk mitigation can be partially accounted for by understanding risk as social rather than just individual. We proposed to develop and test a culturally grounded social model of risk identification, evaluation and response. The social model includes an understanding of how past and present events interface with the contemporary context in older people's evaluation of home safety. The proposed study will conduct qualitative research as a "natural experiment" using an already occurring public health effort to identify, describe and analyze: (a) the meanings that older people give to key concepts such as home safety risk and change, (b) the role of stories of other people and information passed among friends in decisions to make or not to make changes, (c) the place of variations in social boundedness and social hierarchies in responses to offers of home modification, and (d) the ways the safety education process contributes to older people's decisions to make home modifications. The study will be done in four economically and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in a large West Coast city, with the goal of identifying variation along lines of SES, age, gender, and ethnicity/cultural group with respect to interpretations of risk, safety, and willingness to undertake home modification.