Abstract:

Explores the meaning of the home environment for older people and attempts to account for the ways in which older people and the home environment are meaningfully linked. Data were derived from seven 68- to 90-year-old adults, using ethnographic interviewing and observational techniques. The psychosocial processes linking the older adult to the home environment were categorized as social-centered, person-centered, and body-centered. The social-centered process concerns the way individuals use public, societal ideals for environmental order. It is the process through which individuals interpret and put into practice their version of what is proper and what it means to be a person. The person-centered process involves the individual's life course as an object that is manifest in the environment. Environmental attachment is part of the person-centered process representing the continued bonding of the person to a now-departed loved one. The central concern of the body-centered process is the meaningful relationship of the body, as an object, to the environmental features that surround it. Seven discrete components of these processes are illustrated using extensive case examples.