The quality of life of nursing home residents may be enhanced by providing them with opportunities to participate in social activities involving different age groups and community-dwelling age peers. To obtain descriptive data, and to investigate the relationships between patterns of social interaction and subject characteristics, time-sampled observations of peer and intergenerational social interactions of the elderly residents of the Benedictine Health Center for the elderly at the College of St. Scholastica, Minnesota, were conducted over a 7-month period. The observation instrument provided proportion-of-time data for 24 locations, 29 activities, 18 types of social interactions, and 9 types of persons. At the beginning and the end of the study residents' functional and psychosocial characteristics were assessed using a multidimensional interview instrument. Observation data showed that, in addition to the very popular individual rooms, areas that afforded opportunity for watching what was going on and for chance social encounters were popular. Interactions between different categories of elderly did not occur as often as within group interactions. Residents' cognitive abilities predicted certain aspects of social activities better than health status and self-care ability. However, both health status and self-care ability accounted for 30 percent of the variation among subjects in their psychological well being. (Author/BL)