Frail paths home: former long-term homeless women and men narrate their experiences and meanings of home

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on how former long-term homeless people narrate their experiences of housing and home during their life course. The data consist of 11 narrative interviews on housing history. The secondary data consist of six go-along interviews in places chosen by the interviewees. After being homeless for a long time, the interviewees had permanent apartments in a supported housing unit’s community. My interest was in how a long-term homeless person makes an apartment a home after having a fractured housing history or no home at all during their life. I analysed the data by focusing on the narrative episodes related to housing, home, neighbourhoods and living in the housing unit. The crucial aspect was the interviewees’ experiences and understanding them as spatial and temporal processes. The home experience is constructed in everyday practices that are connected to various places and spaces. Another important perspective is understanding the strong connection between memory and place. The interviewees had both fractured housing histories and various traumatic or harsh experiences connected to the notion of home. They also narrated stories about their past and present homes through relationships and everyday practices. The conclusion of this research is that social workers should use more narrative methods to understand how clients’ identities and experiences are constructed in their life course and help their clients build new empowering narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Homeless
• long-term homelessness
• home
• experience
• narrative
• place
• space
• housing first

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lefebvre defines (2001, 11) the physical as ‘nature and the Cosmos’ and the mental including ‘logical and formal abstraction’. The physical also includes built environments, and the mental includes peoples’ cognitive and psychological processes.

2. Reform schools in Finland are either state administered or private child protection institutions with primary schools.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Academy of Finland and its program ‘The future of living and housing’ (ASU-LIVE) [grant number 255379];Academy of Finland in yy. 2011–2015 [255379]. My research is done in one of the sub-projects called Long-term homelessness and Finnish adaptations of the 'Housing First' model.