Current Projects
Community Response to Cumpulsive Hoarding in Older Adults
SSW Investigator(s):
Gail Steketee, PhD
Funding Source:
Farnsworth Foundation grant for doctoral research by Christiana
Bratiotis, MSW
Project Description:
The substantial risk to health and safety for older adults,
their families, and the community, together with lengthy, challenging,
and limited treatment options makes compulsive hoarding a difficult problem
for agencies to address. These factors also require a coordinated and
effective agency and community response, but public policies in most
communities are punitive rather than intervention focused. The recent
formation of several task forces across the country to correct this problem
provides a promising avenue to address hoarding on a community and personal
level. This project evaluates the effectiveness of eight multidisciplinary
community task forces developing across the U.S. Methodology includes
interview surveys of key task force members; participant observation
of task force meetings for a subset of the community sites; and a case
study of one community in the early stages of developing interagency
coordination for compulsive hoarding. The study will capture the perspectives
of public and private service providers (mental health, housing, elder
services, public health agencies, private family service agencies) and
community enforcement organizations (police, fire, legal systems, animal
control), and will generate policy recommendations to address local and
state responsiveness for this population of vulnerable elders.
