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Ageing in place over time: the making and unmaking of home

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posted on 2023-08-11, 14:15 authored by Ruth Webber, Vannesa May, Camilla Lewis

‘Ageing in place’ is a key component of UK policy, aimed at supporting older people to remain living in their own homes and communities for as long as possible. Although wide-ranging, the scholarly literature in this field has not sufficiently examined the interconnections between ageing in place and the changing experience of ‘home’ over time. This article addresses this gap in a novel way by bringing together qualitative secondary analysis of longitudinal data with critical literature on ‘home’ and Mason’s cutting-edge concept of ‘affinities’ to understand the multi-dimensionality of home in relation to ageing in place. The article makes significant methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to the field of scholarship on home, by demonstrating how homes are made and unmade over time. Discussions of home emerged organically in the longitudinal data that focused on people’s travel and transport use, allowing our qualitative secondary analysis approach to look anew at how experiences of home are dynamically shaped by people’s potent connections inside and outside the dwelling. Presenting an empirical analysis of four case studies, the article suggests that future discussions in the field of ageing in place should pay closer attention to the factors that shape experiences of the un/making of home over time, such as how deteriorating physical and mental health can shape how people experience their dwelling and neighbourhood as well as their relationships across these settings.

Funding

The experience of 'ageing in place' over time: a longitudinal perspective

Economic and Social Research Council

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Urban Ageing and Social Exclusion

Economic and Social Research Council

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History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy

Research Unit

  • Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP)

Published in

Sociological Research Online

Volume

28

Issue

3

Pages

759-774

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by SAGE Publications under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2022-03-01

Publication date

2022-05-24

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

1360-7804

eISSN

1360-7804

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Ruth Webber. Deposit date: 3 March 2022

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