Vol.:(0123456789) SN Soc Sci (2021) 1:30 https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-020-00035-z ORIGINAL PAPER Healthcare satisfaction among the older adults with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia Hui‑Peng Liew 1 Received: 5 July 2020 / Accepted: 17 November 2020 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract The study seeks to examine how older adults in the United States with either Alzhei- mer’s disease or dementia rate the importance of attributes associated with health- care seeking and utilization (e.g., afordability, type of facility, and accessibility). Using conjoint and cluster analyses, the purpose of this study is assessed using data from the 2014 Health and Retirement Study. Findings revealed that satisfaction per- taining to these attributes slightly difered across clusters. This suggests that it is important to ensure that healthcare services are afordable and accessible, and the preferences of older adults are taken into consideration when making treatment or other relevant programmatic recommendations. Keywords Healthcare satisfaction · Cluster analysis · Conjoint analysis Introduction More than 5 million elderly Americans aged 65 and older are aficted with Alz- heimer’s disease (Alzheimer’s Association 2017). To this day, it remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and disability (especially dementia) among the elderly and this disease has emerged as one of the biggest challenges to public health and personal wellbeing in the United States. In fact, deaths resulting from Alzheimer’s disease increased by about 89 percent between 2000 and 2014 (Alzheimer’s Asso- ciation 2017). Due mainly to the aging baby boom generation, it is estimated that the number of people living with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia in the United States is projected to grow to 13.8 million by the mid-twenty-frst century (Hebert et al. 2013). Starting from 2006, pay-for-performance that emphasizes patient-centered prac- tice (Brown and Piatkowski 2016) begin to assume an even greater signifcance * Hui-Peng Liew liewhp@unk.edu 1 Department of Sociology, The University of Nebraska at Kearney, Copeland Hall 120, Kearney, NE 68849, USA