Individual and Contextual Protective and Risk Characteristics for Residents of Recovery Homes

ABSTRACT

Some recovery homes have facilitating relationships and organizational characteristics, and there are also social capital differences among residents of these recovery homes. It is important to better understand the impact of protective and risk individual and house factors on recovery issues among residents of these community-based settings. Individuals from 42 recovery homes were followed for up to six data collection periods over two years. House level latent class analyses tapped relationship and organizational domains and individual level latent class analyses were from derived from elements of recovery capital. Houses that manifested protective factors provided most residents positive outcomes, except those with elevated self-esteem. Houses that were less facilitating had more negative exits, except for those residents who were the highest functioning. Both individual and house characteristics are of importance in helping to understand risk factors associated with eviction outcomes for residents in recovery homes.

KEYWORDS:

• Social capital
• latent class analysis
• house-level
• individual-level
• recovery homes

Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate the financial support from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (grant number AA022763). The authors appreciate the social network help of Ed Stevens. We also acknowledge the help of several members of the Oxford House organization, and in particular Paul Molloy, Alex Snowden, Casey Longan, and Howard Wilkins.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. One house dropped out completely but another was added after wave 1 bring the total to 43 houses. However, 42 is accurate in the sense that only 42 houses have two or more waves of information available on their residents and a single data point carries no information about change or the probability of an eventual exit.

2. 34 entered an OH for the first time at wave 7 and we were not able to determine whether they exited given that the last data collection occurred during wave 7; 15 were forced out because their OH closed before wave 7 and before they filled out a second survey; 15 were missing their reason for leaving and had only filled out one survey before leaving.

3. Six participants were observed to leave the recovery homes during the course of the 2 year study but their reason for leaving could not be determined. We right censored these individuals at their penultimate survey as they had at least one additional wave of data beyond their baseline survey. In addition, 34 residents had more than one OH exit, either from two different OH’s or from the same OH. To avoid greatly complicating the exit model for a very small number of individuals, we only included their first exit in all analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism [AA022763].