HaroldUrman
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Feb 10, 2009, 9:27 AM
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Benchmarks for Retirement Communities - Statistics for Consumers
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By Harold N. Urman, Ph.D
If you are currently searching for retirement living or have a loved one in a retirement community, you should be interested in knowing how satisfied residents, family members, and employees are with the community. It has been my experience that organizations (whether in retirement living, financial services or information technology) that are committed to quality improvement and high consumer satisfaction, will measure satisfaction on a regular basis (i.e. annual or bi-annually). Organizations that do not have the same commitment, do not measure satisfaction because they don’t want to know how they are doing.
There is currently no standard way to measure satisfaction on such dimensions as Communication, Dining, and Activities, of the key consumer groups already mentioned. So, with no standard measure of satisfaction, how can you evaluate the quality of different retirement communities? Although not an easy question to answer, understanding benchmarks is one way to help level the playing field.
A benchmark is defined as “something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged.” The first thing a benchmark tells you about a retirement community that can show you their benchmark data is that they engaged the services of an independent company to assess the satisfaction of their consumers. Next, a benchmark allows you, as a consumer, to compare retirement communities you might be considering against other communities that happen to use the same survey to measure satisfaction. Although there are many ways to calculate a benchmark, the most common method is called a percentile, which is a value that ranges from 0 to 100, exactly like a percent, but means something slightly different. The most common percentile used as a benchmark is the 50th percentile; also know as the median or middle value. The median is the middle number from an ordered list of numbers.
So what does this mean to you? The table below shows the results of an employee satisfaction survey for a single retirement community. The score for Communication is 71, which, if you had no other information but the Communication score, might lead you to believe that 71 were okay, but not great. Now look at the benchmark at the 50th percentile for Communication, which is a score of 64. This means that of all the other retirement communities that have used the same survey, 50% of them have a Communication score above 64 and 50% have a Communications score below 64. Since the retirement community you are considering has a Communications score of 71, it is clearly performing better than 50% or more of the communities.
I mentioned earlier in this article, a percentile can be any value from 0 to 100. So what happens when we raise the standard of the benchmark from the 50th percentile to the 75th? Notice that the 75th percentile benchmark for Communication is a score of 75. This means that of all the other retirement communities that have used the same survey, 75% of them have a Communication score below 75 and 25% have a Communications score above 75. Since the retirement community you are considering has a Communications score of 71, it is not performing in the top 25% of the communities.
Unfortunately, there is no standard satisfaction score or benchmark to evaluate the quality of a retirement community, but at a minimum the satisfaction score should be at least above the 50th percentile and edging towards the 75th percentile.
In closing, here are a few questions you would want to ask the retirement community you are considering about satisfaction.
1. Do you measure resident, family, and employee satisfaction?
2. How often do you measure satisfaction?
3. Do you measure satisfaction using your own survey or do you use an independent company?
4. If they use an independent company ask: a. Do your results include benchmark data? b. What percentile is used for benchmark comparisons? c. How many retirement communities make up the benchmark?
Finally, make sure you see all the scores, not just the overall satisfaction score or the one or two scores the retirement community performed best on.
There are many factors that go into the decision making process when selecting a retirement community. Satisfaction data should be one of those factors.
Harold N. Urman, Ph.D. is an educational psychologist and co-founder of Vital Research, a consulting firm specializing in research and evaluation. Established in 1982 and based in Los Angeles, Vital Research is a national research and consulting firm with expertise in senior living services satisfaction measurement.
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(This post was edited by HaroldUrman on Feb 10, 2009, 10:54 AM)
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