COLLEGE STUDENTS' ATTITUDES TOWARD RESIDENTIAL CARE FACILITIES

This study was designed to explore college students attitudes toward residential care settings for older adults. Subjects were 109 female students aged 18 to 71 years (M = 24.8, SD = 9.49) and 22 male students aged 19 to 43 years (M = 23.3, SD = 5.24) enrolled in a Psychology of Aging course at a local state college. Students interviewed older residents of 96 different long-term care facilities and completed a questionnaire that assessed their impressions of the facility and its residents. Students openness to living in long-term care settings and positive and negative statements about the facility visited were the main measures of student attitudes toward such settings. Nursing homes were perceived more negatively than any other type of long-term care setting. Students who had been affected by meeting the needs of an elderly relative were more open to living in residential care settings, as were students who interviewed residents who were satisfied with their lives. Nursing homes elicited the least openness to living in residential care facilities, whereas assisted care and continuing care facilities elicited the most openness. Students who perceived residents as mentally alert made fewer negative statements about the facilities visited.     

TV's distorted vision of poverty

Avoiding almost entirely the depiction of poverty during prime‐time broadcasts, television networks present a sentimentalized vision of economic deprivation that omits or minimizes hardship while idealizing the supposed benefits of a spartan way of life. Much happier than the harried members of middle‐ and upper‐income groups, poor and working people on television seldom strive against their economic fates or against the system. Conclusions are based on a monitoring of prime‐time entertainment broadcast by the three commercial networks during “ratings month.”