How commercial senior living facilities help enhance the social well-being of older customers through social activities: Evidence from China
The fast-growing ageing population has posed numerous challenges across the world. Social isolation has become a major problem with health and economic implications globally (Buheji et al., 2020; Hall et al., 2021). Owing to the changes in family structures which have led to limitations in care provision from family members, commercial senior living facilities have emerged as a solution to older adults’ care. Transformative service research, which focuses on the uplifting changes generated by the interactions between service entities and customer entities, has been applied to diverse studies to examine the potential effect of services on customers’ well-being, particularly among vulnerable customers. Services provided by hospitality businesses have been criticized for their negative impact on public order (e.g., Barnoya et al., 2016; Harnden, 2018) and limited effort in offering services contributing to well-being outcomes. Despite the fact that hospitality has already attracted the attention of scholars in relation to improving individuals’ wellbeing, it is argued that the transformative potentials of hospitality services has not been entirely explored through the lens of transformative service research. This study aims to investigate how elderly customers’ engagement in interactive social activities provided by commercial senior living facilities helps them connect socially and enhance their social well-being. This research demonstrates: firstly, the extent to which social activities provided by commercial senior living facilities supplement the lost social relationships of older adults; and secondly, the fact that commercial relationships developed in commercial settings are crucial to older customers’ social well-being. For this, this study applied a sequential explanatory mixed-method research design. In the quantitative phase, the questionnaire was administered face-to-face, and data was collected from 267 older customers residing in commercial senior living facilities in China. Partial Least Squares SEM (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the data. In the qualitative phase, three focus groups were conducted based on the results yielded from the quantitative phase. Each focus group comprised of six participants, including two employees in charge of social activities in commercial senior living facilities, two older customers from commercial senior living facilities and two government officials or employees from the ageing development foundation. The data was analyzed using thematic analysis to explain and further explore the quantitative results. The findings indicate that social interactions generated by participation in social activities contribute to older customers’ social well-being. Employees, peers and outsiders play an important role in fulfilling older customers’ social needs. In addition, there was evidence indicating resource integration occurred during social interactions, which resulted in transformative values. This explained what had happened during older customers’ social interactions with various actors. Furthermore, the moderating role of social connectedness is highlighted as contributing to older customers’ social well-being. In particular, this study provides a better understanding of the important role hospitality services play with service offerings in addressing a societal problem that the ageing population is facing-older adults’ social connectedness and social well-being. This study makes a distinct contribution to the existing body of knowledge by employing a transformative service research framework to commercial senior living facilities and emphasizing the impact of interactions between service and customer entities on the social well-being of older customers.
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