The quality of home help services as perceived by the users depends on the performance of the service providers such as the handling of requests, easy-to-understand explanations and continuity of service, as well as the quality of the personal relationship between clients and helpers. The “Service Provider’s Response Scale” is a model consisting of five factors to measure the quality. However, the validity had been confirmed with data taken from only one area. Therefore, in order to investigate the cross validity, the scale was applied to other areas in the present study.

  The investigation was conducted for elderly persons who used home help ser vices. An exploratory factor analysis, conducted by using the 520 responses without missing values, revealed the same factors as the hypothetical model. Though the fit index of RMSEA was poor, under the subsequent confirmatory factor analysis, the CFI and TLI indicated a good fit. Therefore, the consistency of the variance of factor structure of the scale was investigated by using multi-group analysis. Since the model, under the condition where factor loading, covariance of factors and residual variance of items were equally constrained, was acceptable in terms of the goodness of fit of the model, the cross validity of the scale was confirmed.

  Aging people are rapidly increasing in Japan and nursing care for the demented elderly is a serious problem. Structure of nursing care staff’s experiences was investigated from an interactive standpoint by conducting interviews with staff of daycare services for demented elderly persons. Exploratory analysis was conducted on data from participant observation. Then a structural model was developed and examined. Results indicated that staff recognized care to include “accepting and supporting the users,” feeling interactivity about supporting, and the importance of psychological perspectives of support. They sympathized with the demented users, and their families, and with their own work colleagues. Simultaneously, they felt that they could not understand the demented users and felt a sense of powerlessness. Moreover, they experienced the dilemma of doubts about their colleagues and users’ families. It is suggested that reducing this dilemma and perceiving the users comprehensively were important for developing the staff’s understanding of the users, and for developing self-esteem, as well as for improving the quality of nursing care and mental health of the staff.

  In previous years, due to changes in global climate, natural disaster has damaged vulnerable people’s lives and properties annually nationwide in Japan. We conducted a questionnaire survey to long term care insurance facilities. There are 7,680 such facilities in Japan and 27.9% of them returned answer sheets. The results show that 10.2% of those facilities are damaged by natural disasters. Natural disaster has affected the elderly people in the facilities very seriously. Victimized facilities show a higher score of standard deviate, earthquake: 5.36, typhoon: 4.28 are higher than non-victimized score of 2.61.

  From this research, it became clear that every facility needs awareness-raising to prepare the prevention system from natural disaster. The most important solution is to ensure that the elderly have both evacuation assistance and medical care needs delivered rapidly and safely. Moreover, the elderly have to be aware of the importance of obtaining information about daily care system and emergency medical care at the time when natural disaster hits their facilities. Long-term care facilities have to be upgraded through proper equipment and systems.

  This research attempts to examine disaster prevention influenced by natural disaster experience in long-term care facilities.

  The purpose of this comparative study is to examine the function of one Senior College between 1998 and 2008 (class year).

  For this purpose two questionnaire surveys with similar questions were conducted to the participants of Nishinomiya City Senior College in 1998 (N＝753) and 2008 (N＝1,247). After the comparison of the main attributes of the participants, reasons of participation and evaluation of the Senior College, the author tried to detect the most dominant axes of the participants’ attitudes towards the College in 1998 and 2008 by using Hayashi’s quantification method Ⅲ，and analyzed each component.

  The results demonstrated that the main axes were “healthy life - human relations/learning”(1998) and “daily life related - human relations/social”(2008). In 1998 participants’ learning and human relations were supposed to be interwoven, whereas in 2008 learning and human relations were at a distance. This was interpreted to mean that a difference of function of the Senior College occurred between 1998 and 2008.