Nurses' Perceptions of Mental Confusion in the Elderly: Influence of Resident and Setting Characteristics

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Abstract
A strict medical model makes no allowance for the influence of social factors on medical judgments. If either patients'' social characteristics or differences across social settings have an impact on these judgments, then their inclusion in the medical model should increase its explanatory power. This question is investigated among 415 residents of 12 British [UK] homes for the aged using a set of hierarchical regressions that compare the extent to which judgments of mental confusion are due to patients'' medical characteristics, patients'' social characteristics and differences from home-to-home. Significant influences of social factors, with larger effects on the perception of symptoms than on the interpretation of symptoms, and larger effects due to home-level variables rather than to individual-level social factors were shown.