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Home as a personal space and a source of well-being: horizons and description
Home is a part of everyday personal experience. It is a partly unreflected source of personal well-being, self-support, or exhaustion. Constructs of place attachment, place dependence, and place identity (Altman, Low, 1992; Manzo, 2003) are not sufficient to detect all properties of home as a place for living; for this task more focused constructs seem to be relevant – e.g. such as controllability, potential, self-presentation, historicity etc. (Nartova-Bochaver, 2014).
Our objective was to analyze the components of personal representation of a home in a small pilot study. Participants were 15 adult women wrote essays answering 9 questions about their homes, their ideas of home and possibilities of the mutual alterations between the home and the owner.
The content-analysis of 328 essay elements by 2 judges was used.
The results allow supposing at least three horizons of the home representation existing at the same time.
1 – Universal archetypical image of home: safety and security; family and close relationships; space attachment and psychological rehabilitation; self-expression, self-presentation.
2 – Personal image of home: individual ideas toward comfort and aesthetics; development, self-regulation, and relationships regulation among home habitants.
3 – Desired home image: interaction of the objective criteria and subjective representations on comfort.
From the psychotherapeutic perspective, home studies allow developing the tools for improvement house as a personal, valued space with possible mutual influence between space and its habitants.