A continuing-care retirement community (CCRC)or life-care communityis a residence and nursing care option designed to respond to the needs of elderly persons as they need more supportive services over time. Although CCRCs have been in existence for some time, little longitudinal research has been conducted on these facilities. In Continuing-Care Retirement Communities the authors present a multifaceted portrait of CCRCs since the mid-1980s. With a review of community organizational and economic status and interviews of over 2,000 CCRC residents, the study examines resident profiles, resident satisfaction, differences among the communities, and controlled comparisons with elderly people in other settings. The book also analyses and integrates the findings as a whole, deriving implications for policy, planning, and future research. This documentation of the quality of life for CCRC members will be of use to gerontologists, educators, researchers, health policy and finance professionals, CCRC managers, and federal and state regulatory agencies."In the growing field of continuing-care retirement communities this is a groundbreaking and significant publicationa mini encyclopedia of what is now known about life care communities with all their variation. This is an invaluable resource for planning future development and internal programming and for gaining a better understanding of the reach of social research which tries to probe not only the readily popular statistics, but the less traceable dimensions of human behaviors and choice taking as more and more citizens begin to consider how to plan for their aging years." -- Robert Morris, Gerontology Institute, University of Massachusetts