The Home Environments of Older People: a Description of the Psychosocial Processes Linking Person to Place

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This study describes how older people endow the home environment with meaning. Specifically, it describes the nature and meaning of the linkages between the older individual and the home environment, suggesting that the home environment is given meaning through three classes of psychosocial processes relating the person to (a) the sociocultural order, (b) the life course, and (c) the body. Seven discrete components of the processes are illustrated, using extensive case examples derived from lengthy ethnographic interviews with seven elderly informants. In the context of the relationship of the individual to culture, the study assumes the salience of personal meaning as a significant level of analysis.