Sheltered Care: A Typology of Residential Facilities.

With the return of large numbers of ex-mental patients to the community, a new, privately owned system of sheltered care has developed for those individuals unable to establish an independent living situation for themselves or return to a family. Given a sample of 211 facilities in the State of California, five relatively independent dimensions were identified to characterize sheltered-care facilities: complexity, program orientation, control, support, and medical orientation. An analysis of facility score profiles generated six basic types of facilities. A typology of this nature can now be used as a descriptive model to examine placement and effectiveness issues related to the sheltered care environment.