Assisted living housing for the elderly: Symbolic and physical properties of homeyness.

Assisted living, an emerging housing type, has been promoted as a noninstitutional relocation choice offering personal care services for the elderly in a residential or homelike context. Yet, it is unknown whether assisted living, and in particular its exterior appearance, is actually perceived as homelike. Few researchers have addressed what home actually means in architectural terms to nontraditional populations such as the elderly, and even fewer have investigated homeyness in relation to assisted living. Drawing upon Grant McCracken's work, a framework is proposed which suggests that homeyness, in the context of assisted living, entails symbolic properties of supportive protection as evidenced by enclosure, familiar housing cues, and care; human scale; and naturalness. Two studies focused on the exterior appearance of assisted living housing in relation to the proposed framework. Both studies used color photographs of existing assisted living buildings. The first study explored elderly participants' perceptions of this housing option by requesting them to indicate how much they liked or disliked the various scenes of buildings. The second study examined which physical features contribute to a homelike appearance. For this study, two groups of participants--the elderly and family members who would be involved in the relocation decision making process--were asked to evaluate the scenes in terms of homeyness. Responses were structured through a sorting task. Findings from both studies indicate that three characteristics of the scenes were particularly salient in the evaluations: entryways, massing or building height, and sense of institutional or homelike. The elderly and family members showed strong agreement with respect to many of their responses. Dissimilarities, however, are also important to note. In particular, the elderly tended to favor sheltered entries on a small scale while family members placed less emphasis on a one story building height. The results of both studies provide support for the conceptual framework of supportive protection, human scale, and naturalness as well as numerous specific examples of the ways in which the exterior of assisted living housing can be designed as a noninstitutional or homelike housing choice for potential clients and users.Ph.D.ArchitectureCommunication and the ArtsGerontologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130535/2/9732135.pd