Understanding Home as an Emotional Place

As part of a series of ESRC-funded collaborative activity, Dr Hannah Absalom, Associate with the Centre for Urban Wellbeing, centres an emotional understanding of the home in her research. This perspective emerged in her thesis through interviews with residents of social housing from across England. What became clear is that for many people, the material quality of the home is entangled with psychological wellbeing. Here is an extract from the first report that emerged from this research theme that helps to explain the idea:

definition of home

From this perspective ‘wellbeing’ cannot be separated from the material condition of the home, and vice versa. Hannah’s campaign work within the English social housing sector includes a call for this understanding to be adopted, and for social landlords to collaborate with tenants. Hannah uses the idea of ‘Home Creation’ to communicate this. From this perspective, the landlord and the tenant can work together to turn a property into a home. Through ‘home creation’, people who may be coming to the social housing sector with home-based trauma can work on developing a positive relationship with their ‘self’, with the home, their landlord and neighbourhoods. Home-based trama may come from long periods in temporary accommodation, surviving domestic abuse, or leaving care. This perspective is a significant challenge to English social housing, where the current approach is to allocate an unfurnished property, with the responsibility then on the new tenant to undertake the home creation work; a task that can feel insurmountable without the material and psychological resources to ‘make’ a home.

You can find out more information through the 'Understanding Home as Emotional Place' report.

What makes you angry and fearful about your home and the services from your landlord?

This was the question that a group of tenant-researchers wanted to explore in an emotionally informed workshop. The workshop emerged through our explorations of the possible utility of collections of insights from Psychologically Informed Environments, Trauma Informed Design, Behavioural Economics and Geographies of Home studies. Taking these ideas to tenants in the form of lectures and seminars proved to be a rich experience. The enthusiasm to explore the ideas was a joy to work with and helped open up the space to explore the challenging topics of anger and fear. It was through this workshop that two key research themes emerged, domestic abuse and how tenants and housing practitioner ‘encounter’ each other in the tenants’ home.

Domestic abuse and localities

Domestic abuse was a challenging topic to research, it was however, timely, as new legislation in 2021 made it mandatory for local domestic abuse plans to be created. What was missing from the development of these plans was the involvement of local communities. An approach that was quite understandable as domestic abuse is a deeply misunderstood topic. Through additional funding from the University of Birmingham’s Public Engagement Fund, we worked with Dr Kelly Henderson <need a link to her consultancy> to co-create the resource ‘Changing the Story of Domestic Abuse’. This resource is framed as an expedition and facilitates an exploratory approach to developing local domestic abuse plans. It was a challenging piece of work and required a great deal of reflexivity from Hannah and the tenant-researchers involved in creating the resource. There is a real sense though that if we can do it, you can too, and we encourage you to collectively explore the creation of localised domestic abuse plans. We also encourage social landlords to think about how their services can contribute to identifying and reducing domestic abuse and aiding in safer transitions out of abusive environments. Doing so is more than ‘producing social value’, it can save lives.

Home Encounters

This research initially focussed on a case study at one housing association keen to improve their services for tenants. A week of fieldwork was undertaken, with observations and interviews undertaken by Hannah. When discussing the project with the group of tenant-researchers, they suggested that people who do not allow access to their homes be included. Quite a challenge to try to speak to people who may not want to talk to you! For this element of the research, a Research Associate is being recruited to train the tenant-researchers in qualitative interviewing. The plan is to reach out through the social housing tenant networks and find tenants who do not allow access, so they can be interviewed by our tenant-researchers. We are excited to see how this strand develops and are working on creating the interview schedule together.

Hannah’s background in community and volunteer management while working in social housing shows in her approach to research. She believes in centring what matters to tenants in her work, and using her social power to influence practitioners, campaigners and policymakers to centre an emotional understanding of home in relevant policy and practice.