Towards a clearer understanding of the meaning of "home"

The term "home" has been liberally (mis-)applied to a wide range of residential service settings for people with an intellectual disability over many years. This paper attempts to restore the term's descriptive value by identifying the meaning of home through reference to the intellectual disability and mainstream professional literature. From this literature review the main attributes of home have been identified revealing that home is a multi-faceted concept with no single contributing attribute making a place a home but conversely, the absence of any one potentially rendering a home a "non-home". Using Maslow's (1943) need hierarchy as an ordering framework, these attributes of home are placed according to their relative contribution to meeting individual need in order to present residential service providers with a guide to developing genuine homes for the people they serve. Further research is required to develop valid, reliable and efficient instruments to measure the presence and extent of these elements which appear essential to transform a residential service setting into a home.