About the series

"Seniors for Sale" is the first comprehensive accounting of Washington's adult family homes. Seattle Times reporter Michael J. Berens interviewed more than 250 people, including adult-family-home owners, residents and their families, industry experts, state and federal regulators and law-enforcement officials.

Berens also filed nearly 50 state public-records requests to obtain more than 15,000 pages of documents, including internal e-mails from the Department of Social and Health Services and the state Department of Health.

He also obtained and analyzed computer databases and thousands of pages of disciplinary actions from the state DSHS.

He drew from all this information to create a custom database of adult- family-home enforcement actions from 1995 through 2009. He analyzed this data for some of his findings.

Additional resources include a state database of death certificates, which comprised hundreds of thousands of records, and a state database of hospital admissions, the Comprehensive Hospital Abstract Reporting System.

Credits Parts 1-6

Reporter: Michael J. Berens

Photographer: Alan Berner

Multimedia producer: Genevieve Alvarez

Data analysis: Michael J. Berens, Justin Mayo

Editor: James Neff

Desk editor: Carole McClosky (1-3); David Rea (4-6)

Photo editor: Fred Nelson

Print designer: Bob Warcup

Graphics: Aldo Chan (1-3); Mark Nowlin (4-5)

Supervising producer: Tiffany Campbell

Web designer/developer: Amy Richardson

Additional production: Danny Gawlowski, April Simpson, Erika Riggs

Researchers: David Turim, Gene Balk