Contextualising, Conceptualising and Constructing At-Homeness: Towards an Integrative Framework for Residential Care

The concept of at-homeness has been increasingly adopted in residential care to describe a metaphorical sense of being "at home". Within a sector often criticised for displacing residents from familiar environments, at-homeness has come to symbolise the ideal experiential outcome of care. Yet, despite a growing body of work enriching our understanding of what at-homeness entails, existing conceptualisations tend to overlook the processes through which at-homeness is personally and multiply constructed and are shaped predominantly by studies of older adults in long-term care contexts. To address these limitations, a qualitative study, employing a user-involved approach, was conducted in Hong Kong, incorporating in-depth interviews with 60 residents of mental health residential services and ethnographic observations across three hostels. Analysis shows that at-homeness is shaped through boundary-setting and bonding between the self and three arenas-social relations ("people"), material environments and temporal orientations. Residents interpreted core qualities of at-homeness across personal, relational, material and temporal dimensions and their constructions were guided by distinct logics involving self-appraisal, temporal integration, relational attunement and socio-cultural grounding. The study proposes an integrative framework that reframes at-homeness as a dynamic, negotiated process, offering new insights for advancing theory and strengthening methodological and practice approaches in residential care.