An examination of lifestyle and adjustment in three community residential alternatives.
Supervised apartments give adults with ID the most normal day-to-day life without losing happiness.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Singh et al. (1991) watched adults with mild or moderate intellectual disability living in three places. The places were supervised apartments, group homes, and family homes.
The team used rating scales and interviews to see how normal, happy, and connected each life looked.
What they found
Adults in supervised apartments cooked, shopped, and chose their own routines more often. They liked their lives just as much as adults in family homes.
Group-home adults needed more staff help and joined the neighborhood less. Social ties stayed weak in every setting.
How this fits with other research
Lam et al. (2011) asked over 1,000 adults the same question twenty years later. They still found group homes beat independent settings on planning and community links, backing up the 1991 size story.
Lindsley (1992) seems to disagree. That study says more staff oversight lowers independence and happiness. The gap is real but small: R looked at extra rules inside one house type, while N compared whole house types. Less rule-bound apartments won in both papers.
Young (2006) and Irvin et al. (1998) each show adults gaining daily-living skills after moving to smaller, community spots. Together they build a chain: smaller, freer housing keeps helping people grow.
Why it matters
When you write an ISP or pick a waiver slot, fight for supervised apartments or very small homes. These places teach shopping, banking, and friend-making better than larger group homes. Push funders to add apartments first, not just more group beds.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Lifestyle normalization, community integration, adjustment, social support, and personal satisfaction were examined for 133 adults with mild and moderate retardation living in small group homes, supervised apartments, and with their natural families. Results of questionnaires and structured interviews with care providers showed that the residence settings supported quite different lifestyles with respect to independence, lifestyle normalization, and integration. Persons in supervised apartments achieved the most normative lifestyles with greater personal independence and community integration while reporting levels of lifestyle satisfaction and personal well-being similar to that of persons living with their own families. Results also showed that social integration, that is, participation in activities with peers without disabilities, was extremely limited for all participants, even those living in natural families. The study exemplifies the use of a residential typology to investigate the relationship of environmental factors to community adjustment. It also exemplifies the use of multiple perspectives and multiple measures to evaluate quality of life in community living alternatives.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1991 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(91)90002-a