Home Tours: An approach for understanding dampness and wellbeing in the domestic environment

Abstract

When research encounters are conducted within the home environment there is a need for strategies that are ethically and practically sensitive to the complex character of these places. We report on an approach to explore the management practices of damp and mouldy housing, and wellbeing implications for tenants living in private rentals in New Zealand. The objective of paying close attention to the embodied and mental activities that a tenant performs within their home led to development of ‘Home Tours’. This is a multi-modal strategy combining a phenomenological methodology with mobile interviews, photographic elicitation, embodied observations, and logbook reflections in order to account for eventualities occurring during a research encounter within the home. We outline and critically reflect on this approach as a way of investigating tenants’ experiences of damp housing and wellbeing implications in a close-up and ethically sound manner.

Keywords

• Housing
• Renting
• Dampness
• Qualitative
• Methodological innovation
• Wellbeing