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THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF HANDBOOKS PROVIDING LAW RELATED INFORMATION FOR THE ELDERLY
Abstract
It has long been recognized that the elderly have a need for law related information on a variety of topics specifically addressed to the problems of old age. In addition, there are a large number of nonlawyer volunteers and professionals who work directly with the elderly whose responsibilities and duties can be greatly facilitated by similar access to accurate and understandable law related information. This research reports the development and evaluation of a set of monographs designed to fill the need of the elderly and nonlawyer volunteers and professionals who work with the elderly for specific law related information. An examination and analysis of the existing literature showed that there were seven general areas in which there were specific needs for information. After consultation with experts on the needs of the elderly, individual topics within each area were selected for coverage in the monographs. To prepare each chapter, advanced law students were used to research and prepare traditional legal memoranda on specific topics. These were then used as the factual foundation for the preparation of each chapter. To help insure accuracy of the legal content and the comprehensibility of the text in general, each chapter was submitted to careful review and editing by a number of individuals skilled in legal issues relating to the elderly, and to a sample of elderly persons who volunteered to read and comment on the material. The effectiveness of a selected handbook on consumer concerns at communicating law related information was evaluated using a post-test only control group design. The post-test questionnaire was designed to assess the individuals over-all knowledge of consumer-related knowledge, and his or her specific knowledge on individual subsets of information within that broader topic. Information from each participant on several demographic variables was also collected in an attempt to relate performance on the post-test to socioeconomic variables. Performance of the experimental and control groups was investigated using several analyses of variance, t-tests, and correlation matrices. The results of the study indicate that the handbook on consumer issues was effective at communicating law related information to the elderly. Participants who had the opportunity to read the handbook before the post-test had significantly higher total scores than did participants in the control group. As was expected, the mean subscale scores of experimental participants were also generally higher than those of the control participants. A second consistent finding was that males scored higher than females on total scores, and were generally higher on subscale scores. Males scored proportionally higher than females in both the experimental and the control group. The results of the evaluation are discussed in terms of their implications for identifying specific areas of need for information, for targeting those areas for more effective use of resources, and for suggesting.
Subject Area
Social psychology
Recommended Citation
OVERCAST, THOMAS DOW, "THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF HANDBOOKS PROVIDING LAW RELATED INFORMATION FOR THE ELDERLY" (1980). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8021350.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8021350