Seeking Person-Environment Fit in Community Care Placement

Large numbers of patients leave mental hospitals to become residents of community-based sheltered-care facilities, yet little is known about how they use particular local environments to satisfy their needs and wants. This paper considers a crucial issue in community care placement, person-environment fit, using survey data from interviews with 397 residents in 211 sheltered-care facilities, drawn from 157 census tracts in California. It studies how individual characteristics interact with eight environmental contexts to influence sheltered-care residents' external social integration. The results underline the power of social norms to determine ex-patient outcomes within specific environments. Ex-patients do relatively better in facility/community environments that allow their independent outreach, and also where they either share personal characteristics with the dominant social group or the dominant group is able to tolerate behavioral differences.