Gerontology professor Robert Applebaum and Miami Social Gerontology PhD alum Anna Rahman cited in NYT article.

No Luck Finding the Right Nursing Home? Maybe Yelp Can Help

NEW YORK TIMES – PAULA SPAN

Can you really select a quality nursing home by reading Yelp reviews?

There’s a nursing home the next town over from me, for instance. Nine reviewers have given the place both laudatory five-star ratings (“She has a far greater quality of life than she would have living at home”) and outraged one-star complaints (“The nursing staff, RN’s and CNA’s are caring but overworked”).

[…]

In Ohio, which conducts its own statewide nursing home surveys, “plenty of times residents really liked a facility with a low star rating, and vice versa,” said Robert Applebaum, a gerontologist at Miami University in Ohio.

He has found that families’ and residents’ satisfaction varied significantly at the poles — they did prefer five-star to one-star homes — but the differences in satisfaction between one- and two-star homes, or those with four versus five stars, were negligible.

[…]

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