THE NATURE OF WANDERING IN DEMENTIA - A GUTTMAN SCALING ANALYSIS OF AN EMPIRICAL CLASSIFICATION SCHEME

Hope and Fairburn (1990) presented a typology of wandering behaviors based on the frequency of such behavior in a sample of community-dwelling, demented elders. They then linked the nine types of wandering behaviors to a set of etiological components to show that the apparently disparate types of behavior lumped together as 'wandering' may actually have distinct neurologic or neuropsychiatric origins. In fact, the distribution of the types of wandering behavior in the sample points to a single latent variable, with a hierarchical structure that demonstrates the centrality of purposeless behavior in the class of wandering behaviors. This is shown in a Guttman scalogram.