Thirty elderly nursing home residents and ten community residing older adults were observed in group settings. Their behavior was assessed for dependent personal maintenance, independent personal maintenance, and appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. Responses by staff and peers to these behaviors were classified as positive, negative, or ignore. The fre-. quency of occurrence of these behaviors as well as the relationship of resident to peer or staff behaviors were analyzed. Results indicate that communityresiding elders' behaviors differ from nursing home residents' in quantity rather than quality of interactions. There was a lower frequency of behaviors in the nursing home residents. Though older adults respond differentially to various behaviors of other nursing home residents, staff responses were consistent regardless of residents' behavior. These results suggest that geriatric home residents' behavior can be characterized as withdrawn rather than dependent.
Striking reports of sudden psychological and physiological decline have frequently been found in descriptions of the elderly who are institutionalized . For example, Allyon and Azrin (1968) suggested that dependent behavior increases as a function of institutionalization and this hypothesis has resulted in a number of successful applications of operant techniques to increase resident self-sufficiency (Geiger