As part of its comprehensive care and support services, the Austrian Red Cross offers "assisted living" services. This enables the clients to lead a self-determined and safe life in a vital social environment. The Red Cross aims to continuously develop its assisted living services. For this purpose, it is important to understand how the current offer is accepted by the clients and where there is still potential for improvement. Furthermore, this study will examine the impact of the assisted living service on the quality of life of the clients.

The Red Cross commissioned the NPO Competence Centre to conduct a survey among the residents of the "assisted living" sector in Lower Austria and Styria on their satisfaction and quality of life. The aim is to conduct a full survey in the six Red Cross assisted living facilities in Lower Austria and the eleven facilities in Styria. After the questionnaire, which will be used for the customer survey, was developed in several workshops with representatives of the Red Cross, a pretest for the finalisation of the survey instrument is now planned. The survey will be conducted in writing in autumn 2021. Among other things, the satisfaction of the clients with the services currently provided by the Red Cross and their quality of life will be surveyed. In order to improve and further develop the current services in the future, the Red Cross is also interested in recording the needs and wishes of the clients through the survey. In order to be able to respond to the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic and the associated changes in the assisted living services, part of the questionnaire also deals with current social events. These aspects are particularly important for assessing the quality of life of clients and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on their living situation. When the survey is repeated, this section of the survey can be varied and adapted to current social events at that time.

After completion of the survey, a uni- and bivariate evaluation is carried out in the form of frequency evaluations, factual-logical groupings and, where appropriate, tests for significant differences between the two provinces. This enables a comparison between Lower Austria and Styria in the form of a benchmark. Furthermore, the results regarding the quality of life of the clients are compared to standardised quality of life indicators, such as those recorded by Eurostat, where this makes sense. Finally, a multivariate evaluation in the form of a factor analysis for the dimensional reduction of the items and a multiple regression of the factor values found on the central questions "overall satisfaction" and "quality of life" is calculated. In this way, it can be investigated which of the questioned aspects have the strongest effect on the overall satisfaction or the quality of life of the clients in the assisted living area of the Red Cross.

The procedure and the results of the entire analysis will be presented in the final study report. The study is expected to be completed by the end of 2021.