This article presents the results of a systematic review of two decades of research on nursing home populations in three major psychiatric journals. The review indicates that very little psychiatric research has been undertaken in nursing home settings. The work that has been done is more often qualitative: case studies, program reports or reviews of the research, rather than quantitative research studies. The small amount of empirical research that has been published has suffered from sampling, design, and analytic shortcomings. Until recently, there has been little funded psychiatric research in nursing home settings, reflected in a worse than average disapproval rate for NIMH grant submissions involving nursing home populations. The implications of this review are discussed and recommendations are made for advancing this area of study among mental health professionals.
K F Y wofm-Nursing homes, psychiatric disorders, research methods.
Nursing homes represent the largest and perhaps most costly component of the health care system for the elderly (Rango, 1982;Freedland and Schendler, 1983;Levit, 1985). As of 1985, an estimated 1.2 million Americans lived in nursing homes (General Accounting Office, 1986), nearly 90% of whom were over the age of 65 (Burns et al., 1988). Roughly the same proportion of all nursing home patients have diagnosable psychiatric conditions. Though the recent psychiatric Epidemiological Catchment Area studies indicate that for the elderly population in the community psychiatric morbidity is lower than that of the general population (Weissman et al., 1985;Robins et al., 1984;Myers et al., 1984), this is not the case for the elderly in nursing homes. Rovner et al. (1986) found that of the nursing home patients sampled,