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The meaning of home: An exploratory study of environmental experience

Article  in  Journal of Environmental Psychology · December 1986

DOI: 10.1016/S0272-4944(86)80002-0

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Journal of Environmental Psychology (1986) 6, 281-298

T H E M E A N I N G O F H O M E : A N E X P L O R A T O R Y S T U D Y OF
ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE *

JUDITH SIXSMITH
Department of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH, U.K.

Abstract
Despite a growing literature on the meaning of home, the complexity of home is, as
yet, little understood. Typically (although not totally), much of the work in this area
has not involved empirical research and overall the field lacks a coherent theoretical
background. This paper presents a phenomenologically based study designed to
reveal what home means to people through their everyday environmental experiences
of home. In this exploratory study, the multiple sorting task (MST), was used as an
aid to in-depth, systematic interviews which highlighted the personal, multidimen-
sional nature of home. Findings indicate that: (1) different types of home exist; (2)
different meanings of home co-exist.
Relationships between the meanings of home were explored using multidimen-
sional scaling techniques to reveal a superordinate structure which forms the first
stages of a tentative model of home, This involves a tripartite division of home into
three modes of experience: the personal home; the social home; the physical home.
The results of the study are located within theories of place and the links between
these theories and the findings are discussed.

Introduction
What is home? What does 'home' mean? On hearing the word, a range of places
spring to mind such as a house, a neighbourhood or perhaps a country. However,
beyond these global descriptions, little is understood about the meanings home has
for people. This paper presents a phenomenologically based investigation of mean-
ings of home. It has three aims:
(1) to reveal different places identified as home in accordance with Norberg-
Schulz's (1980) levels of existential space;
(2) to identify the meanings of home;
(3) to develop a tentative model of home experience by exploring the structure of
relationships between meanings of home.
Indications of the meanings of home can be derived from a number of commercial,
social, academic and literary sources. Unfortunately, they tend to present a set of
rather disparate ideas and observations. For instance, G a n s ' (1962) investigations in
Boston, and the study of London's Eastenders by Willmott and Young (1957),
stress the home as a social unit, where strong kinship ties cement the meaning of
home. The poet Emily Dickinson glorifies the sanctity of home (cf. Mudge, 1975),
while home also appears as a medium of self-expression and identity (Rainwater,
1966; Cooper, 1972, 1974; Appleyard, 1979; Rapoport, 1982). As Appleyard states,
The most important messages in this system (people and homes) are, I think, those
we send back to ourselves. These are the interactions with our homes that we initiate
* This study formed part of the author's M.Sc. in Environmental Psychology at the University of
Surrey, supervised by Professor D. V. Canter.

0272-4944/86/040281 + 18 $03.00/0 O 1986 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited

282 J. Sixsmith

and it communicates back to us. Their realisation is a never-ending accumulation of

intimate and subtle actions and perceptions, which confirm, establish, question,
modify, enrich, extend, transform, and in other ways, affect our sense of identity.
By choice of house and areas to live in, and personalization (Becker, 1977) of these
in terms of facade, decor, furnishings, etc. (Duncan and Duncan, 1976) the house
may psychologically be transformed into a home.
Furthermore, architects tend to stress the physical house as a home (Cramer,
1960; Segal, 1973; Hellman, 1983), although some take the symbolic significance of
home seriously (e.g. Polikoff, 1969). Alternatively, more phenomenologically
oriented researchers emphasize the notion of appropriation (Korosec-Serfaty, 1985)
and rootedness to places (Relph, 1976). Home can then be seen as a centre of
emotional significance, of familiarity and belonging (Tuan, 1977; Seamon, 1979;
Buttimer, 1980). In this sense, home need not involve a physical structure, but may
exist on any level of existential space (Norberg-Schulz, 1980) such as neighbourho0d,
town, city, country, etc.
Other depictions of home include home as territoriality (Porteous, 1970), home as
a locus in space (Gelwicks, 1970), a base of activity Rakoff, 1977; (Hayward, 1977),
permanence, privacy and security (Hayward, 1977), and home in the sense of an
experiential shell (Bachelard, 1969) with continuity extending from childhood to
adulthood (Hayward, 1977).
Recently, home has also been proposed as 'a crucial site of cultural activity and
cultural expression' (Gauvain, Altman and Fahim, 1985) at one and the same time,
portraying a person's individuality and their ties to society (Airman and Gauvain,
1981). Thus, the home is seen as a dynamic (re)creation within a temporal framework
(Dovey, 1985; Werner et al. 1985).
The very diversity of these notions of home suggest that home is a complex,
multivarious phenomenon. However, understanding the complexity of home is
difficult at present because there is no overall theoretical framework to instruct
research and base empirical findings. In fact, empirical studies on the concept of
home are few and far between (exceptions are Hayward, 1977; Lawrence, 1982,
1983; Korosec-Serfaty, 1984, 1985). Thus, in order to identify and clarify different
meanings of home an exPloratory study is required, based on what home means to
people from their own everyday, lived experiences: Once meanings are evident, the
structural relationships between meanings of home may be more fully explicated.
Because of the exploratory nature of the study presented here, no single theory is
appropriate to the data collection, analysis or interpretation. Instead the research
can be located within the general framework of the environmental experience of
place (cf. Canter, 1977, 1984; Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977; Norberg-Schulz, 1980).
Despite much controversial discussion, different theories of place tend to emphasize
different aspects of the person-environment unity. This may be a function of the
different perspectives adopted by the theorists. Relph, for instance, is concerned
with exploring the 'authenticity' of places, where places are characterized by the
concept of existential insideness. Spaces, on the other hand, are seen as brutalized
landscapes of placelessness. Tuan emphasizes the role of socio-cultural factors in the
way areas are experienced as places. Rootedness through familiarity and belonging
plays a part here in the definition of place.
One further model of place in psychology describes places in terms of a pheno-
menological unit of socio-psychological and physical characteristics (Canter, 1977,
 The Meaning of Home 283

1983, 1984). In this, three constituents of place are proposed--form, meaning and
activities--within which the essence of place is definedin a three-fold classification
of social, spatial aspects and environmental services. These constitute qualitatively
distinct referents of place which are modified by the purposive, interpretive person
interacting as an integral part of the person-environment unity.
Clearly, the diversity of models makes it difficult to distinguish the essence of
place. What is needed is a thorough understanding of the processes operating in
person-environment interactions so that the relative strengths and weaknesses of
each model or theory can be assessed. It is in this sense that the present study
adopts a place oriented framework, but no specific place theory. By exploring the
experience of home phenomenologically, parallels between actual experience of home
and constituents of place may be elaborated.

Method
As one primary aim was to elucidate people's own conceptions of home rather than
to impose those from the literature, a phenomenological perspective was taken (cf.
Wann, 1964; Valle and King, 1978; Seamon, 1982). The starting point of the research
was the person and their expertise (cf. Kelly, 1955). Their habitual lived experience
of home was the focus of attention. Thus, researcher preconceptions in the form of
pre-specified types or meanings of home were not involved in the data collection.
This meant that the method used had to allow free expression to all participants,
while at the same time, ensuring systematic data collection for comparative purposes.
Open ended data collection often generates rich and varied information which does
not lend itself to easy comparisons across people. One method which can structure
data collection in a systematic way, while avoiding leading participants into par-
ticular ways of thinking, is the multiple sorting task.
The multiple sorting task (MST) was developed from Stevenson's Q technique
(1953) and Sherif and Sherif's (1967) 'own categories' procedure (cf. Canter et al.,
1985). It aims to provide a method for revealing and exploring the ways in which
people naturally conceptualize and categorize their world. The task itself involves
the allocation of prescribed or participant-generated elements to categories, accord-
ing to their similarities and differences on a single sorting criterion. For example, a
person could divide a set of photographs of actors (elements) into four groups
(categories) such as 'happy', 'sad', 'serious' and 'angry' according to the idea
'emotions' (the criterion). Once one criterion has been completed, the elements could
be sorted again according to a different criterion, e.g. the photos could be sorted on
degrees of beauty.
In the present study, both the elements and sorting criteria were participant
generated. Firstly, people provided descriptions of all past, present and possible
ideal homes, along with places never thought of as home. No preconceptions limited
the type of places described, and descriptions could take any form the participant
felt conveyed their thoughts. These were the sorting elements. Then, the participant
sorted their own descriptions into categories using a single sorting criterion based
around the general idea of 'what is home to me'. The criterion was thought up and
carried through by the person concerned. Only after the criterion and categories had
been discussed was a further sort conducted. This continued until all the person's
ideas had been exhausted. Providing descriptions, the MST procedure and
284 J. Sixsmith

clarification process typically lasted from two to three hours, although one person
continued for ten hours (over three days). In this way, data were collected within a
standard, structured and systematic framework which allowed people freedom of
expression.
Because of the relativepurity of the information gained and its structured format,
intersubjective comparison and verification of types and meanings of home was
possible. This allowed the research to take account of individualistic case studies
and then progress beyond these to shared conceptualizations.

The sample
Hayward (1977) rejected the inclusion of students in his sample because of the 'un-
usual' nature of the places they described as home. He limited his research to housing
environments. However, in any exploratory work on the meaning of home, such
unusual places are of interest. As Horowitz and Tognoli (1982) comment, there has
been a concentration on traditional household forms, to the exclusion of alternative,
yet common living arrangements. Students in particular have often lived in a range
of different residential arrangements, e.g. family, friends, alone, etc. With this in
mind, a student sample was chosen: 22 postgraduates took part in the study. Of
these, 14 were female and 8 male and ages ranged from 22 to 29 years ~old (mean
24.6 years). All the students were living in university accommodation on campus at
the time of the study and had lived in a range of different kinds of areas and
accommodations before this. None of the students had children.

Data analysis
The data analysis presented here follows three avenues. In the first instance, a
comprehensive approach to interpreting the meaning of home needs to look beyond
each person's private accounts of home into collective evaluations. In order to gain
a deeper understanding and so enable comparisons and generalisations to be made,
content analysis of the types of places people described was performed. Secondly,
the sorts, the meanings of home, were content-analysed. This enabled shared con-
ceptualisations of home to emerge, both in terms of types and meanings of home.
Lastly, multidimensional scaling techniques were used to reveal any structures
inherent in the meanings of home.

Content analysis
Following Krippendorff (1980), content analysis was applied to reduce the large
volume of data to more manageable content categories. This procedure involved
transcribing the taped MST interviews and extracting key statements separately from
both descriptions and sorts. These were grouped together on the basis of conceptual
similarity and the resulting categories were given collective titles. Care was taken to
ensure that key meanings were identified within the context of the task, and that
any idiosyncratic statements expressing common meanings were allocated to their
appropriate categories. While the limits of content analysis are recognized, such as
imposing the researchers interpretational framework on the data and the inescapable
loss of meaningful data (cf. Abrahams, 1984), the method of data collection and
analysis together attempted to keep data in as pure a form as possible, while main-
taining meaning and reducing information to a form available for statistical analyses.
To avoid an overtly subjective category scheme, an intersubjective check was
 The Meaning of Home 285

made on the replicability of the analysis. For both the descriptions and the sorts,
the researcher gave the key statements, together with a list of category headings, to
a rater who was familiar with the aims of the project but not with the actual data
themselves. This person had then to allocate each statement to a category or form
new categories where he thought these were required. Any disputed categories were
then subject to negotiation and a solution agreed upon between the researcher and
the rater. Reliability figures appear in the text where appropriate.

Results

Types of home
Two hundred and six descriptions of different places (mean 9.4) were produced and
of these a mean of 5.5 places were mentioned as home. A c o m m o n assumption
about home is that each person has only one home. However, descriptions of more
than one place that was in some way presently a home were frequent. Thus, home
does not signify a single place for each person, but can be a number of places
simultaneously. The interrelationships between different homes may form an
important nexus of meanings through which personalmeanings of home emerge.
After careful content analysis, 19 distinct categories of home emerged from the
descriptions (inter-rater reliability 85%). These did not simply reflect houses or
architectural styles, but were often identifiable through personal and social char-
acteristics underlying any physical structures involved. Examples of this are the
family house/home, the home town or country, or perhaps the persons own room or
hall of residence. Moreover, some homes were not tied in any way to physical
structures, for instance one person described her home in a religious, spiritual sense.
It is important when trying to understand the meaning of home to consider the
different forms a home can take, whether they be essentially physical or social in
nature. A restricted view of house or physical structure as home may obscure as
much as it discloses.
Places are listed in Table 1, along with the frequency with which they were men-
tioned as homes or non-homes. Bearing in mind the freedom of expression allowed
the participants in the study, some places are infrequently mentioned. However, the
data do represent places which are meaningful to the participants rather than a
reflection of what the researcher considers is or is not a home. Indeed, the extensive
range of places mentioned and the fact that a home for one person is clearly no such
thing to another testifies to the variability and complexity of home.
Most of the types of home listed in Table i are self-explanatory and were clearly
identifiable from the descriptions. As can be seen in Table l, some places were
always thought of as home, such as the homeland or the family home, others were
never represented as h o m e - - t e m p o r a r y accommodation and digs--while still others
fall midway with the status of home for some people but not others, e.g. the hall of
residence or the parental home. In this latter case, it would seem that once the
person has moved out of the family home both physically and psychologically, then
it may lose the significance of being a home. In discussion, it seemed that a home
is home depending on the extent to which it fulfils the persons requirements, their
changing objectives and circumstances. For example, changing family needs and
work requirements reduced one persons ' h o m e ' to a frustrating house which was too
small for her needs and which she was eager to leave. Thus, some homes may be of
286 J. Sixsmith

TABLE 1
Types of home
Home Non-home
1. Town 2 4
2. Friends house 4 5
3. Owned home 6 1
4. Room 8 14
5. Childhood house 6 4
6. Ideal home 19 4
7. Future home 19 5
8. Family home d 10 0
9. Married home 5 1
10. Country (homeland) 4 0
I 1. Parents home b 12 3
12. County 4 4
13. Shared house/friends 4 11
14. Shared house/partner 2 1
15. Area 5 5
16." Miscellaneous 6 7
17. Hall of residence 3 3
18. Campus 3 2
19. Temporary accommodation 0 5
20. 'Digs' (rented bed and breakfast ) 0 4
aFamily home--shared with parents while on vacation. The person still feels
it is their main residence.
bParents home--parents still live there but the person has left and does not
consider it to be their main residence.

a transitory rather than constant nature. O n the other hand, some homes are much
more enduring over space and time, continuing from childhood to the present.
This means that the researcher must carefully guard against seeing enduring char-
acteristics where they m a y not exist.
In concluding this section there are four main points:
(1) types o f places that constitute homes for people cover a range o f places and so
are subject to wide individual differences;
(2) these places exist on m a n y levels o f existential space (cf. Norberg-Schutz,
1980) and m a y have strong (e.g. a room), minimal (e.g. a county) or nonexistent
(e.g. a spiritual home) physical components;
(3) the types o f places that are h o m e for one person m a y not be h o m e to another;
(4) home m a y be transitory rather than constant in nature.
Having identified different sorts o f homes, the question remains, what qualities
make a home? Thus, the next stage o f analysis investigates the meanings associated
with home.

The meaning of home

In total there were 164 different sortings carried out by all respondents, with an
average o f 7.4 sortings per person. The main consideration at this stage was to see if
any categories o f meanings o f h o m e could be f o u n d and whether there was any
support for these categories in the literature. T o this end, the sorting criteria were
 The Meaning of Home 287

content-analysed revealing 20 content categories (inter-rater reliability 82%). Each

category denotes a separate meaning of home supplemented by 13 individualistic
conceptions of home. This reflects meanings both in the private and collective
domains. The 20 collective categories are described below together with their fre-
quency of mentions:

1. HAPPINESS ( f = 14)--the experience of happy events and general feelings of

happiness are an integral part of home.
2. B E L O N G I N G ( f - - 17)---comfort, relaxation, familiarity contribute to a sense
of belonging to home (cf. Tuan, 1975).
3. RESPONSIBILITY ( f = 7)--stability arising from ownership and respon-
sibility for the home (Haddon, 1973).
4. SELF-EXPRESSION ( f = 14)--behaviour in and manipulation of the place
are closely tied to ideas of home. At home you can do what you want, and per-
sonalisation (cf. Becker, 1977) allows expression of self identity.
5. CRITICAL EXPERIENCES ( f = 2)--learning to be independent, formative
experiences, living through a stressful period are formative of deep associations (cf.
Proshansky et al., 1979) with home.
6. P E R M A N E N C E ( f = 8)--the continuity of home (cf. Rakoff, 1977).
7. PRIVACY ( f = 4)--privacy here refers to Altman's (1975) model of micro-
interpersonal boundary regulation.
8. TIME PERSPECTIVE ( f = 9)--places exist as home whether in the past,
present or future (cf. Bachelard, 1969; Hayward, 1977).
9. M E A N I N G F U L PLACES ( f = 4)--because of specific but not necessarily
critical events taking place there.
10. K N O W L E D G E ( f = 3)--tied to familiarity, this aspect of home emphasises
physical and social knowledge.
11. P R E F E R E N C E TO R E T U R N ( f - - 4)--i.e. in terms of a locus in space
(Gelwicks, 1970; Tuan 1975).
12. TYPE OF RELATIONSHIP ( f = 10)--type of relationship and personal
choice over being with particular people is the essential focus of this category
(Hayward, 1977).
13. QUALITY OF RELATIONSHIPS ( f = 4)--the quality of relationships.
14. FRIENDS AND E N T E R T A I N M E N T ( f = 6)--people visiting the home
who form the core of social entertainment in the home.
i 5. EMOTIONAL E N V I R O N M E N T ( f = 4)--a place where there is love often
signifies a home.
16. PHYSICAL STRUCTURES ( f = 6)---enduring physical characteristics.
17. EXTENT OF SERVICES ( f = 14)--lighting, heating, household equipment,
garden, telecommunications etc. (cf. Canter, 1984) are sometimes seen as a necessary
part of home.
18. A R C H I T E C T U R A L STYLE ( f = 5)--some homes were meaningful because
of their architectural style.
19. W O R K E N V I R O N M E N T ( f = 4)---working at home is sometimes a defining
aspect of home, e.g. students often have no division between work places and living
places. Work is part of home because this is the only quiet place available to them.
20. SPATIALITY ( f = ! 2)--spatial properties and the activities that those spaces
allow, as well as their location, are an important aspect of home for some people.
288 J. Sixsmith

These 20 categories represent a fairly comprehensive set of meanings of home.

Meanings are interdependent, and no single one is seen as an essential quality a
place must possess before it is conceived of as home. Rather, the interrelations
between various meanings form a personally meaningful network of experience
which, taken together, are defining qualities of home. With this in mind, a further
form of analysis was required to identify the structural relations between meanings
of home.

The structure o f home

Analytical tools were required which could handle a complex multidimensional data
set. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques were chosen as they could be used
heuristically in an explorative mode rather than in terms of specific model testing.
By using MDS techniques in this way, an 'empirical phenomenology' (cf. Sardello,
1978) is possible which enables and indeed lends force to ways of understanding the
intricate phenomenological essence of home. Thus, MDS techniques allow Sys-
tematic analyses which (1) reveal structures implicit in the data; (2) represent them
in a readily accessible and visual form; and (3) capture complex relationships
(Coxon, 1982).
Multidimensional scaling techniques have proved useful in psychological research
(e.g. Jordan, 1978), in environmental psychology (e.g. Canter and Rees, 1983; Groat,
1982), in social psychology (e.g. Forgas, 1982) and in geography (e.g. Dear, Fincher
and Currie, 1977).
Smallest space analysis formed the basis of the following analysis. In SSA-I data
are presented in a two-way table, where entries in the table indicate the 'score' an
object has on an attribute, or variable. The procedure computes (dis)similarity
measures between the variables and using a simple Euclidean distance model, turns
the dissimilarity into Euclidean distances. Finally, the variables are arranged in n-
dimensional space to display a 'best fit' solution, so that the closer two variables are
to each other, the more similar they are. Conceptual similarity is consequently,
spatially represented by adjacency in space, thus following the principle of con-
tiguity developed by Guttman (1957) and empirically tested by Foa (1958). For a
clear discussion of SSA-I see Coxon (1982) and Davies and Coxon (1982).
For the purpose of this analysis the 20 different meanings of home constituted 20
separate variables. The frequency with which each type of home was described by
each one of the 20 meanings of home was noted and a frequency data matrix
constructed.
This produced a 20 x 19 cell, data matrix with the 20 meanings of home as
columns acting as variables, and the 19 rows as types of home. In each of the cells
there is a frequency which represents how often a particular type of home has been
described by each meaning of home.
This matrix of frequencies formed the basic input to an SSA programme. The
SSA computed Kendall's Tau correlations between the meanings of home, converted
these into a distance matrix and used this to distribute spatially the variables on a
graphical plot. The results of this analysis are shown in Figure I. Each p o i n t o n the
plot represents one of the meanings of home. The reason for this analysis was to see
if there were any inherent patterns of similarity of meanings across all types of home.
As can be seen on the plot, in terms of regional distinctions (cf. Borg, 1979) in the
space, a structural pattern of similarities can be identified. Three distinct modes of
 The Meaning of Home 289

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FIGURE 1. SSA-I plot: regional structure of the experience of home. Numbers represent the 20 meanings
of home listed above. Three regions have been identified: personal, social and physical experienceof the
home environment. Coefficient of alienation 0.111 in 30 iterations.

experience of home have emerged and are arranged in a circular fashion around the
plot. This indicates qualitative differences which can be classified as: the personal
aspects of home; the social aspects of home; and the physical aspects of home.
Constituents of each of these modes of experience are outlined in Table 2. The
tripartite division is almost complete, with only one exception. 'Responsibility' (point
3) is found within the physical region but might have been expected to fall within
the personal mode of experience. Perhaps this reflects a slight emphasis on respon-
sibility towards the maintenance of physical property, especially with owner-

TABLE 2
Composition of the three experiential modes
Personal Social Physical
Happiness Type of relationship Structure
Belonging Quality of relationship Services
(Responsibility) Friends and entertainment Architecture
Self-expression Emotional environment Work environment
Critical experiences (With others) Spatiality
Permanence
Privacy
Time
Meaningful places
Knowledge
Desire to return
290 J. Sixsmith

occupied properties. A description of the three experiential modes shows how the
meaning-categories are linked together within this superordinate structure and how
the structure itself can act in providing a framework for the empirical and theoretical
issues discussed earlier.

A. The personal home. Here the relationship between places and the attributes and
processes of the self are tentatively mapped out. The home can be seen as an exten-
sion of oneself, perhaps in two senses, corresponding to James's (1982) distinction
between the subjective self (the T ) and the objective self (the 'Me'), a distinction
extensively documented in the literature on self and 'being' (Gergen, 1971; Keen,
1978). These are marked i and ii, respectively, in Figure 1.
(i) The first region concerns the ongoing processes which fundamentally constitute
the self, those desires, feelings, hopes and actions (Keen, 1978) which are grounded
in persons in situations (Tiryakian, 1968). Thus the home appears as a profound
centre of meaning and a central emotional and sometimes physical reference point
in a person's life which is encapsulated in feelings of security, happiness and
belonging. These are not 'things' in the sense that a person possesses them, but
people are aware of them as essential to their sense of being. One person puts it this
way:
You feel as if you're part of the place and its part of you--you aren't a stranger or
anything. It's part of your history.
It's comfortable, I'm relaxed, I feel relaxed in it because, I suppose, I'm familiar
with it all and, I know what to expect.
Another person conceived of her future home totally in terms of an inner develop-
ment of the self. She said,
It's a sense of completeness in part of feeling at home . . . the development of
character can be parallel to a journey where the destination is home. Your having
arrived--being at home with myself, my own character, I mean satisfied with it all.
Not feeling that the past is wrong and so wishing to change i t . . . realising you can't
achieve any more with this, you know.
This type of total equation of self and home epitomises the home as a way o f 'being'
in the world.
(ii) There seems to be a distinction between feelings of belonging etc. and those
aspects of home that contribute in some way to the person's self identity. On the
one hand, the structure, layout, style, decoration, furnishings, etc., of the home
make it a place above any other, where self-expression is possible. Having created a
home as a reflection of those valued aspects of self-identity such as the artistic.Me
or the intellectual Me, the home becomes a place where the person can just 'be
themselves':
You're bringing a part of yourself into the place--in your things. You feel like
you're accepted in it 'cos you can be yourself in it, you created it.
I can relax control over myself and just be myself. If you can't be yourself at home,
where can you?
On the other hand, knowledge of the home and the important events people have
experienced there are strong ties between that environment and the person. These
can become integral parts of the persons history and sense of identity and continuity.
 The Meaning of Home 291

Things have happened here, things that're important to me ... it's the place I was
away from home first, I was independent and doing things for myself, you know for
the first time. I grew up in it. That made it a home for me.
Only Godkin (1980) and Proshansky (1983) have directly recognized this issue.
Godkin argues that some places are profound centres of significance for the person,
lying at the centre of their sense of self-identity. While Proshansky has elaborated
the self-environment relationship into a theory of place identity. Place identity is a
sub-structure of self identity consisting of,
Broadly conceived, cognitions about the physical world in which these cognitions
represent memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and
conceptions of behaviour and experience which relate to the variety and complexity
of physical setting that define the day-to-day existence of every human being.
[Proshansky, 1983, p. 59.]
The relative importance of other people and physical forms in shaping place identity
implies that distinctions made between self, others and physical environments con-
tinually serve to define bodily experiences and consciousness of the unique person.
It would seem that the home, in terms of the kind of opportunities it affords people
for personal and social action and how these enable self impression and expression
is one profound centre of significance contributing to a sense of place identity. Thus
places, and not least the home, may serve as 'contextual markers' for establishing
one's social identity (see Sarabin, 1983 for a discussion).
One aspect of place identity is concerned with the relative importance of other
people in shaping a person's place identity. How this social perspective operates
with relation to the home is presented in the following section.

B. The social home. Throughout the literature on home there has been a recogni-
tion of the importance of the social function of home (Fried and Gleicher, 1961;
Gans, 1962, Hayward, 1977). In the social home, it is the presence and retgtionships
with other people that contribute towards the place being home. Home is not only a
place often shared with other people but is also a place allowing entertainment and
enjoyment of other people's company such as friends and relatives. As one person
said,
It wouldn't be home without the family, now would it. And then you can bring
people you like, your friends, back and make them a meal or just sit and chat.
There's no front to it, just being together.., well, it's hard to explain, if it wasn't
home it wouldn't be the same.
Where social relationships have turned sour, the effect on a home can be devastating.
For instance, one participant claimed that while her father was present there was an
atmosphere of friction and the house could not be described as her home. When he
was out, the place became the loving home that she was familiar with. Thus, social
networks built around a home and the relationships that create and are created in a
home are of utmost importance.
These categories of home experience have been described by Hayward (1977) and
have been identified clearly in this study. It is familiarity with other people, their
habits, emotions, actions etc., indeed the very knowledge that they are there, which
creates an atmosphere of social understanding whereby the persons own opinions,
actions and moods are accepted, if not always welcomed.
292 J. Sixsmith

When I come in I know Steve'll be there and it's a kind of routine--I ask him
what's going on and he asks me what I've been doing today and we discuss things
there that you wouldn't do anywhere e l s e . . . I mean it might start an argument of
something, or it might be p r i v a t e . . . So its a home for those sorts of things, those
reasons, well for me anyway.
These c o n s i d e r a t i o n s are a p p l i c a b l e to h o m e as a physical structure, the h o m e l a n d ,
county, t o w n etc. as well as to the spiritual h o m e which e m p h a s i s e s c o m p a n i o n s h i p .
H o w e v e r , one further distinction can be m a d e in the experience o f h o m e a n d that
reflects the p e r s o n inextricably l o c a t e d in a physical milieu.

C. The physical home. H o m e as a physical entity e m b r a c e s n o t o n l y the physical

structure a n d style o f architecture b u t also the h u m a n space available,
It's home because the style suits m e - - I like older style houses, there's more character
about them. I like the old sash windows, it's just so very comfortable.

F u r t h e r m o r e , h o m e involves the services a n d facilities t h a t go to m a k e u p the

place (cf. C a n t e r , 1984). W a r m t h , telephones, e v e r y d a y m o d e r n conveniences are
i m p o r t a n t . O n e p a r t i c i p a n t realized the significance o f e n v i r o n m e n t a l services only
after he h a d lived in a house which was e x t r e m e l y basic with r e g a r d to them,
I lived in a place that was freezing cold and damp and I got really sick. It had
nothing in the way of comforts. You can only stand living in that for so long. It
really made me appreciate my own place. It's warm and comfortable, convenient
and all the mod c o n s - - a microwave, automatic washer and a nice big kitchen and
the telephone, that's important, I couldn't do without it. You get cut off without it.

C o n c e p t u a l i z a t i o n o f house as h o m e has been the c o n c e r n o f architects a n d designers

such as C r a m e r (1960) a n d H e l l m a n (1983) w h o see h o m e m a i n l y in spatial a n d
stylistic terms, b u t often to the exclusion o f the p e r s o n a l a n d social aspects o f home.
The idea o f house as h o m e reflects the existence o f h o m e on a m i c r o - p h y s i c a l scale
o f existential space. H o m e also exists on a m a c r o - p h y s i c a l scale. F o r e x a m p l e one
p a r t i c i p a n t says,
A small building can be home just as much as a large one, the difference is, a small
place is home because you feel you're you in it, it belongs to you and you belong to
i t . . . you've got a bit of influence over how things are. But an area or something,
like Surrey, that's home because you're familiar with it. You know the way the little
roads are and the houses and the fields, you know wheat I m e a n . . , you know them
and where you are and how to get around. It's a lot Of stuff. But that's home.
i

M o r e o v e r , there are also h o m e s in which the p h y s i c a l e n v i r o n m e n t p l a y s little o r no

part such as the spiritual h o m e . W h e r e the physical e n v i r o n m e n t d o e s b e c o m e
i m p o r t a n t it seems to act as a focus o f the p e r s o n s activities, m e m o r i e s a n d experi-
ences, indeed their sense o f identity. H o m e is m u c h m o r e t h a n living a c c o m m o d a t i o n ,
it affords o p p o r t u n i t i e s for d o i n g things t h a t are p e r s o n a l l y highly valued,
I work at home a lot. I'm a home-loving person really, I like to be here. It's a big
house and we need that for all our books and things, loads of things. We need the
s p a c e . . . Then there's the video, we bought it and it's changed our lifestyle 'cos we
find it's more flexible--and flexibility, it makes i t - - I ' m more conscious of it,
appreciative. We sit and watch a video together, being together doing that, it's home.

The design a n d layout, the a r c h i t e c t u r a l style, its very structure is i m b u e d with these
instances o f self-impression a n d expression, with m e m o r i e s a n d experiences, Thus,
 The Meaning of Home 293

the physical environment has a role to play in structuring what people do, what they
feel and the sorts of meanings that are associated with' physical form. This indicates
the complexity and inter-relatedness of modes of home experience--the personal,
social and physical home. The division of home into these modes of experience
exists only in an analytical sense, the three being indivisible in the man-environment
unity.
One further issue which emerged from the data emphasises this indivisibility at
the same time as stressing the dynamic, temporal nature of home.

Home: a temporal framework

There has recently been a movement towards locating our understanding of home
within a temporal framework (Ladd, 1977; Tognoli and Horowitz, 1982; Lawrence,
1983, 1985; Werner, Altman and Oxley, 1985). H o w the childhood home is trans-
formed into the adult home and how homes develop over the years with lived-in
everyday experience have been the focus of attention. Places, not least homes, have
a particular historical and temporal background, enduring as they do in physical,
social and psychological space. One indication of the importance of such a temporal
framework is reflected in how some participants expressed their meanings of home
as a function of how adequately the place fitted in with their changing objectives
and desires. For instance, as one person put it,
It's funny but when I was at the first one (University) it was great and that was
home more than anywhere, it still is really. I was doing what I wanted, getting my
degree and I could do it there . . . And I respected the people there. Then when I
was at work, I hated it, I didn't want to be there. What I wanted was to do a Ph.D.
so it was useless, it spoiled everything... I never settled down . . . and now I'm at
Surrey and everything's good a g a i n . . . Yes, it's home.
As people progress through their lives, their objectives and desires construct a
changing flow of cognitions within which a place is experienced. One participant
articulated this concept clearly,
You know, time is just an intellectual idea, what it really means is going through my
different stages of life, that's what my life has been for me. But it's more than that,
because at home, it's a place that you're living and it fits you, and it fits what you're
doing with your life at that time.
He saw sentiments, feelings and social aspects of his life stretched out across a
structured time scale, leading him from his secure and happy childhood home, into
the more active and frantic early years of adulthood, through to the more mature
years of being happily settled down at home with his wife. Thus, the ways in which
a place allows or facilitates changing aims, over time may have direct implications
for the experience of the place as home.

Discussion
The study presented here has shown how the MST used within a phenomenological
framework can provide structured and systematic but essentially free expression for
comparative statistical analysis. This framework allowed a variety of different types
of homes and the multitude of meanings with which homes are imbued to emerge,
thus providing valuable insights into the dynamics of home.
294 J. Sixsmith

Home is a multidimensional phenomenon, neither unidimensional nor created

from a set of standard qualities pertaining either to the person or the place. Rather,
each home features a unique and dynamic combination of personal, social and
physical properties and meanings. This provides one explanation for the wide range
of different types of home and tends to support the finding that the sort of place
that is a home for one person is not necessarily home for another.
However, going beyond personal notions of home, a general, somewhat tentative
model of home experience provides a base within which personal meanings of home
can be psychologically located. A tripartite division of home into personal, social
and physical modes of experience indicates some of the interesting relations between
people and places and, together with the particular constitution of the experiential
modes, suggest directions for future research. For instance, whether one mode of
experience is pre-eminent over another or if this is subject to change over time has
yet to be clarified. Moreover, the categories of experience which go to make up each
experiential mode have yet to be validated and perhaps completed.
Perhaps one way of extending the usefulness of this model in terms of future
research and theory building is to see how far it can cope with exisiting theoretical
frameworks. Indeed, certain parallels between the data driven model of home and
the various place theories suggest links between the theories at all levels of the
model. Firstly, at the categorical level of environmental meanings, the 20 different
meanings of home reflected both Relph's (1976) and Tuan's (1977) home in the
sense of emotional significance. Time and again people referred to a sense of be-
longing, a feeling of relaxation and comfort which to them signified, 'being com-
pletely at home, that is, unreflectively secure and comfortable in a particular locality'
(Tuan, 1977).
Furthermore, references to Seamon (1979) and Buttimer's (1980) dialectics can
also be distinguished, although in a simplified fashion, in the permanence of home
as a place of continuing stability from which one can go out into the world and
return to in the knowledge of its being there for us.
In addition, the home model provides a framework within which theoretical
notions of home such as Cooper's (1972) home as a symbol of self, Willmott and
Young's 0957) home as a social unit and Segal's (1973) house as home can all be
incorporated under the superstructure of the personal, social and physical modes of
experience.
Secondly, at the level of the overall superstructure of place, the three experiential
modes of home are to some extent evident in Canter's (1977, 1984) psychology of
place, especially with respect to the personal and social meanings and physical form
of places. In terms of the 'activity' constituent of places, the home provides a medium
for all manner of personal and social activities through which meanings develop.
Furthermore, similarities between the home model and the social, spatial and service
core model of place are evident. In this, the social aspects of home are emphasized.
Spatial and service aspects of places are also represented in the home model, albeit
in terms of a more total physical experience. Thus, by exploring in detail the ways in
which the home model expresses the links between meaning, form and activity and
the core of social, spatial and service aspects of places, some of the direct and
indirect relations between them may be articulated.
The final part of the home model to be reflected in other place theories concerns
the purposive person in complex environments (cf. Canter, 1984). The present
 The Meaning of Home 295

study incorporates a dynamic role for the person's feelings, thoughts, objectives and
desires, but also locates these within a temporal matrix of past, present and future.
Exactly how these temporally based objectives operate in the formation or main-
tenance of a place as home is not yet clear and may form one direction for future
research.
However, one aspect of places which has received little attention in place theories
is the role of the self and self-identity (exceptions being Godkin, 1980 and
Proshansky et al., 1983). In this respect, the home model stresses the importance of
the self and self-identity in the formation of environmental meaning. But once again
more questions than answers have resulted from the study. For example, what
constitutes self impression and expression in the home? Does this differ for different
types of homes? How does home compare with other places, such as the workplace,
as profound centres of significance lying at the centre of self-identity?
By looking at the data-driven model of home with respect to place, certain aspects
of place theories and their relevance to home are highlighted. Bearing this in mind,
it would seem that place theories do have an important role to play in concep-
tualizing the meaning o f home, and may therefore provide an adequate theoretical
framework for future empirical studies. Clearly, there is some way to go before local
models of places such as that of home can be integrated into or provide a rationale
for more global theories of place. The present study has elucidated the environmental
experience of home using postgraduate students as a data source. This means that
while the results are interesting, they may be specific to students. If these meanings
are to be clarified, verified and developed then research with other groups in society
is necessary. Although there have been recent moves in this direction with studies of
the meaning of home for different age groups (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-
Halton, 1981) and elderly people (Peace et al., 1983; Sixsmith, 1985), sex differences
(Tognoli, 1979) and cultural differences (Sixsmith, 1982), much empirical work
grounded in theory is required.

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Manuscript received: 4 November 1985

Revised manuscript received." 20 May 1986

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