Paradise Lost: how older adult Taiwanese immigrants make decisions about their living arrangements.

Understanding the process of making living arrangement decisions among older adult immigrants is essential to developing and optimizing health promotion strategies. The purpose of this study was to discover how older adult Taiwanese immigrants made decisions about their living arrangements. Fourteen Taiwanese older adult immigrants were recruited from a large Northeastern metropolitan city in the United States. A grounded theory approach was used for data collection and analysis. The process by which participants make decisions about living arrangements is best described with the metaphor of Paradise Lost. The process had three phases: Seeking Paradise, Loosing Paradise and Reconsidering Paradise.