The Relationships of Nursing Home Culture Change Practices With Resident Quality of Life and Family Satisfaction: Toward a More Nuanced Understanding

Transforming nursing homes (NHs) from restrictive institutions to person-centered homes, referred to as NH culture change, is complex and multifaceted. This study, based on a survey of administrators in Minnesota NHs ( n = 102), tested the domain-specific relationships of culture change practices with resident quality of life (QOL) and family satisfaction, and examined the moderating effect of small-home or household models on these relationships. The findings revealed that culture change operationalized through physical environment transformation, staff empowerment, staff leadership, and end-of-life care was positively associated with at least one domain of resident QOL and family satisfaction, while staff empowerment had the most extensive effects. Implementing small-home and household models had a buffering effect on the positive relationships between staff empowerment and the outcomes. The findings provide meaningful implications for designing and implementing NH culture change practices that best benefit residents’ QOL and improve family satisfaction.

Revisión Sistemática: análisis de la biodiversidad en las economías rurales mediante el modelo de hogares agrícolas y recomendaciones para futuros reportes

The Farm-Household models have been used to analyze ex-ante different policies; however, the state of the art is unknown in relation to the evaluation of biodiversity within these models. For this reason, a systematic review on Farm-Household models that integrate the “biodiversity” variable is required. For this purpose, we consulted a specialized search engine, applying a generic search strategy, which identified 1420 articles, of which only 23 were selected based on specific inclusion criteria. There is a gap in the evaluation of biodiversity within Farm-Household models.

Households of the Nobles and Peasants in Užventis Parish, 1836–1861

The article deals with the households of the nobles and peasants in the first half of the nineteenth century in Užventis parish, Samogitia. In the middle of the twentieth century, John Hajnal and Peter Laslett started researching the history of resident households. The researchers formulated theoretical and methodological foundations for household analysis and encouraged other historians and demographers to undertake similar studies. The researchers who analysed the households of Central and Eastern Europe either refuted or corrected many of the statements proposed by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett and established that the most common household in Central and Eastern Europe was a nuclear household, although in many cases it was also possible to find an extended household. However, it was not clarified at what age people started building new households and which household model dominated in Samogitia. Also, it was not known what the difference between a household of nobles and a household of peasants was. The data on the households of the nobles and peasants also interconnected. The households of landlords were bigger than the households of peasants and the petty nobility, because the menage of a landlord used to be part of the household. After analysing the aforementioned data, it has been discovered that in the first half of the nineteenth century, nuclear household dominated Užventis parish. Extended household models were often found as well. The Catholic inhabitants of Užventis parish married late and had a child every two years. Around 3500 Catholic residents lived in Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century. The analysis of the data showed that nuclear household dominated the Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century.

A model-based exploration of farm-household livelihood and nutrition indicators to guide nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions

Assessing progress towards healthier people, farms and landscapes through nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) requires transdisciplinary methods with robust models and metrics. Farm-household models could facilitate disentangling the complex agriculture-nutrition nexus, by jointly assessing performance indicators on different farm system components such as farm productivity, farm environmental performance, household nutrition, and livelihoods. We, therefore, applied a farm-household model, FarmDESIGN, expanded to more comprehensively capture household nutrition and production diversity, diet diversity, and nutrient adequacy metrics. We estimated the potential contribution of an NSA intervention targeting the diversification of home gardens, aimed at reducing nutritional gaps and improving livelihoods in rural Vietnam. We addressed three central questions: (1) Do ‘Selected Crops’ (i.e. crops identified in a participatory process) in the intervention contribute to satisfying household dietary requirements?; (2) Does the adoption of Selected Crops contribute to improving household livelihoods (i.e. does it increase leisure time for non-earning activities as well as the dispensable budget)?; and (3) Do the proposed nutrition-related metrics estimate the contribution of home-garden diversification towards satisfying household dietary requirements? Results indicate trade-offs between nutrition and dispensable budget, with limited farm-household configurations leading to jointly improved nutrition and livelihoods. FarmDESIGN facilitated testing the robustness and limitations of commonly used metrics to monitor progress towards NSA. Results indicate that most of the production diversity metrics performed poorly at predicting desirable nutritional outcomes in this modelling study. This study demonstrates that farm-household models can facilitate anticipating the effect (positive or negative) of agricultural interventions on nutrition and the environment, identifying complementary interventions for significant and positive results and helping to foresee the trade-offs that farm-households could face. Furthermore, FarmDESIGN could contribute to identifying agreed-upon and robust metrics for measuring nutritional outcomes at the farm-household level, to allow comparability between contexts and NSA interventions.