An international study of promising practices for long-term residential care

This is the first report of a seven-country study of innovative, promising practices for conceptualizing and organizing long-term residential care. It signals promising approaches to work organization within those facilities, to accountability for quality, to financing and where the goal is to treat both providers and residents with dignity and respect, to understand care as a relationship and to take differences and equity into account. The study's multi-method approach and four theme areas are explained. The challenges of employing key informant interviews in different countries, with team development between countries, and rapid ethnography techniques of residential care facilities in several locations, with protocols and web-based systems ensuring data sharing across the team in a timely and rigorous manner, will be presented. The goals of iterative analysis of theory and data and reflexive analysis methods are outlined. The research goal is to stimulate original thinking by constantly bringing fresh eyes to what is commonplace and ordinary to local observers, but completely new to colleagues and partners from another country. The need to confront opportunities for comparison and rigor with openness to new insights and diverse contexts will be outlined. The philosophical underpinnings of the project are that practical implications of theory and the theoretical implications of practices and processes can create conditions for breakthroughs in theory, empirical results, processes of collaboration, policy and practices not only about conceptualization of residential care and their implications but also about ways of doing and sharing research, filling major gaps in knowledge about long-term care.