Design with Culture: A Framework to Inform the Design and Research of Culturally Sensitive Care Environment

Pai Liu (Clemson University)

Aging is a global issue in the field of healthcare and emotional care causing concerns from different regions in the world. In the United States the issue is not only related to White Americans, but also related to minority groups. Minority groups have never enjoyed the equal qualities of health care in the United States compared with majorities and have never had enough facilities to support their lives, especially for seniors. Senior care facilities, however, rarely consider the immigrants’ cultural needs, for example, elderly Asian immigrants have a high preference of their original food rather than the food in the U.S. Due to such reasons, there is an urgent need of developing care environments for the minority groups. This study aims to develop a framework to illustrate the key aspects of forming culturally sensitive care environment for immigrants, especially Chinese immigrants in this case.

A senior center designed for Chinese immigrants in the United States was selected to conduct a mixed methods case study. A framework proposed from literature review were developed to generate questions for data collection. The data were collected by semi-structured interviews with managers of the senior center, focus groups with their elderly members, documentation, physical artifacts, and behavior mappings. The data were analyzed by thematic coding, content analysis, and connectivity calculation. A new framework was developed based on the framework proposed from literature review and the analyzed results to illustrate the key points of design a culturally sensitive care environment. In addition to design, the framework can also be adopted for future studies of the care environments for minority groups and research regarding the cultural aspects of healthcare environments.

Learning Objectives

1. To develop a new framework for design and research of culturally sensitive environments.
2. To emphasis the importance of culture in creating care environments for minority groups.
3. To give an example of how to define culturally sensitive care environment.
4. To demonstrate a new method, connectivity calculation for analyzing space significance.