{"doi":"10.1111/jgs.19012","title":"<scp>Aging‐in‐place</scp> versus long‐term care conflicts experienced by older adults","abstract":"Aging-in-place versus living in long-term care communities can be one of the most consequential decisions that older adults make in their lifetime.1, 2 Because of its significance, family members are often involved in and influence the decision-making process.3 Even though well-intentioned, family support can cause conflict, increasing stress rather than providing relief.4 Most conflict statements can be categorized within the interest–right–power (IRP) framework, which is widely used in negotiation literature and can be leveraged to resolve disputes. Interest statements delineate the reasons behind a particular position; rights refer to the perceived fairness; and power statements use authority to defend a position. Successful negotiations redirect rights or power-focused arguments to ones that are interest-based. We aimed to describe the conflicts that older adults experience surrounding their living arrangements and determine the frequency of IRP statements. As part of a study on decision-making about aging-in-place versus moving into long-term care communities, we are longitudinally following a cohort of older adults with surveys every 6 months for 18 months. Subjects are asked specifically to describe any conflicts that have occurred about their living situation. Subject responses were transcribed and coded using constant comparative analysis examining type, content, and whether statements were based on interests, rights, or power. Compound conflict statements could map to more than one category. We enrolled 293 subjects (mean age 73.5 years, SD 5 years, 40.4% non-white; 94.5% retention rate), and 124 conflicts were reported over 18 months. Thematic analysis revealed three types of conflicts: (1) interpersonal (subcategories: spouse, intergeneration, and other; e.g., my son comes from Florida and tries to tell me what to do), (2) task (e.g., up-keeping of the place), (3) value-based (e.g., living in a condo vs a more open area). Content was coded into six themes (Figure 1): (1) location change (e.g., My sister says I can be incapacitated and I should go live in senior housing), (2) home maintenance issues (e.g., My son insisted I put in a new lower tub and I didn't want to), (3) different ways of completing tasks (e.g., It is about my children and the way we do things. I don't take my time, and I don't eat the same stuff), (4) safety (e.g., Neighbor's boyfriend kicked in the door and destroyed our property), (5) financial (e.g., I discovered that my spouse secretly met his attorney and changed his will so I would get nothing), and (6) health-related (e.g., The family next door is always having bonfires which mess with my asthma. We've argued). In mapping the statements to the IRP frameworks, coders identified statements as interests-based 46.1% (n = 94), rights-based 13.6% (n = 28), power-based 3.9% (n = 8), and 1.9% (n = 4) had insufficient context to identify the type (Table 1). Our results are the first to describe the types of conflicts older adults face when making decisions about their living arrangements. Most often they experience interpersonal conflicts with family members about moving from their homes into long-term care communities. Older adults in our cohort made mostly interests-based statements—denoting their “why” position behind the conflicts—and secondly, rights-based statements—or perceived fairness. Identifying interests is vital to resolving conflicts as negotiators facilitate agreements by addressing those concerns. While subjects may have felt comfortable revealing their interests to researchers—who were neutral third parties—healthcare providers could serve a similar role in resolving disagreements between patients and families. Providers could help redirect conversations away from rights or power-based arguments toward shared interest-based solutions. Previous work has demonstrated that providers value negotiation training when addressing conflicts with older patients.5 Future research could evalua","journal":"Journal of the American Geriatrics Society","year":2024,"id":468096,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9581,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1104564,"name":"Alaine Murawski","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":282363,"name":"Amber Miller","orcid":"0000-0002-6036-2156","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1104565,"name":"Raven Relerford","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":721421,"name":"Vanessa Ramirez‐Zohfeld","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":969627,"name":"Alexandra Petrakos","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":302259,"name":"Lee A. Lindquist","orcid":"0000-0002-4290-5081","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1222997,"name":"Marianne Tschoe","orcid":"0000-0003-1125-8771","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":5,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:05:19.071498Z","pmid":"38777344","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}