Seniors Housing & Care Journal’s 2009 GE Award-Winning Article
for Outstanding Research

By Scott King

The recently published Seniors Housing & Care Journal selected its GE Award for Outstanding Research Article. It was bestowed upon authors who detail the impact of resident satisfaction on whether or not residents recommended their living community to friends—an important way senior living communities can maintain occupancy levels.

In their article “Satisfied Residents Won’t Recommend Your Community, But Very Satisfied Residents Will,” Wylde et al. analyzed data from a survey of more than 1,000 independent living residents from nearly 300 different communities in the U.S. They explored the relationships between resident willingness to recommend a community, resident satisfaction with the community, community age, and the community’s physical and nonphysical attributes.

The authors found that older communities have an easier time relying on resident referrals for new residents. The longer the community existed, a greater proportion of new residents were likely to have found out about that community from current residents rather than from advertising or direct mail marketing. Notably, those resident recommendations were four times more likely to come from residents responding they were “very satisfied” as from those responding they were “satisfied.”

Nonphysical attributes were found to have greater impact on resident satisfaction levels than physical attributes did. Five areas of nonphysical attributes contributed the most to residents reporting high satisfaction: quality of daily life (cultural, musical, arts/crafts, entertainment and social opportunities); dining flexibility (quality of food, variety of menu items, variety of services and times available to dine); quality of personnel; personal control (privacy and sense of safety and security); and comfort (ease of making friends and the sense that the residence is one’s home).

Wylde et al. emphasize the importance of nonphysical attributes in residents’ satisfaction levels and suggest that senior living communities may experience a greater return on investment when devoting resources to these sorts of attributes as opposed to purely physical ones, such as size and type of residences, building type and structure, and amenities.

For a copy of the article, please e-mail the Journal’s associate managing editor, Scott King, at sking@matherlifeways.com.

Source: Wylde, M. A., Smith, E. R., Schless, D., & Bernstecker, R. (2009). Satisfied residents won’t recommend your community, but very satisfied residents will. Seniors Housing & Care Journal, 17, 3-14.

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