The Meaning of Dwelling Features:

'The Meaning of Dwelling Features. Conceptual and Methodological Issues' relates the research areas of housing preferences and the meaning of a dwelling with each other and with aspects of the means-end approach as applied in marketing research. It results in a conceptual and methodological framework for studying the meaning of preferences for dwelling features. These features are viewed as functional for achieving the goals and values that people pursue. The meaning of dwelling features lies in these functional relationships. The model presented in this study therefore relates preferences for the features of a dwelling to the meaning they have for people. These relationships are called meaning structures. Meaning structures are measured by a semi-structured interviewing technique, which is an adapted version of the laddering technique for measuring means-end chains, and network methods are used for the representation and analysis of these meaning structures

The Measurement and Analysis of Housing Preference and Choice

What are the current trends in housing? Is my planned project commercially viable? What should be my marketing and advertisement strategies? These are just some of the questions real estate agents, landlords and developers ask researchers to answer. But to find the answers, researchers are faced with a wide variety of methods that measure housing preferences and choices. To select and value a valid research method, one needs a well-structured overview of the methods that are used in housing preference and housing choice research. This comprehensive introduction to this field offers just such an overview. It discusses and compares numerous methods, detailing the potential limitation of each one, and it reaches beyond methodology, illustrating how thoughtful consideration of methods and techniques in research can help researchers and other professionals to deliver products and services that are more in line with residents’ needs

The Measurement and Analysis of Housing Preference and Choice

What are the current trends in housing? Is my planned project commercially viable? What should be my marketing and advertisement strategies? These are just some of the questions real estate agents, landlords and developers ask researchers to answer. But to find the answers, researchers are faced with a wide variety of methods that measure housing preferences and choices. To select and value a valid research method, one needs a well-structured overview of the methods that are used in housing preference and housing choice research. This comprehensive introduction to this field offers just such an overview. It discusses and compares numerous methods, detailing the potential limitation of each one, and it reaches beyond methodology, illustrating how thoughtful consideration of methods and techniques in research can help researchers and other professionals to deliver products and services that are more in line with residents’ needs

Editorial special issue: House, home and dwelling

The aim of this special issue is to further our understanding of ‘house’, ‘home’ and ‘dwelling’ by presenting five empirical studies that investigate different aspects of these concepts. All three are complex, multi-faceted and multi-layered concepts, whose diverse connotations are often used interchangeably. For example, the word home is used for the physical structure of the house, for the meanings attached to the house, as well as for the process of homemaking. From an analytical point of view this is undesirable, since we require our concepts to be as unambiguous as possible. Therefore, in this introductory paper, the guest editors present a conceptual framework for studying house, home and dwelling that is based on the fundamental distinction between an environmental object and the affordances attached to it. The studies presented in this special issue investigate different aspects of house, home and dwelling, but they all use this conceptual framework and share the same theoretical perspective on people—dwelling relations. And, although each of the papers has its own merits, together they demonstrate that the conceptual framework is an effective tool for dismantling the concepts of house, home and dwelling.Support OTBOTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen

Private and public green spaces: Meaningful but different settings

There is an increased demand for more dwelling space in Western countries. In the Netherlands, this is expressed as an overwhelming preference for a single-family dwelling with a garden. In contrast to these consumer preferences, governments pursue a compact-city agenda, which implies high-density and mixed-use cities. This gap between consumer preference and government policy has led many policy makers, planners and developers to design dwelling concepts for urban areas in which the private domestic garden is substituted by public green space. In this paper we investigate whether this substitution makes sense or not by comparing the meanings people attach to both concepts. Our results clearly show that unique combinations of functions and meanings are attached to the domestic garden and public green space. Key aspects of public green space are its contribution to the livability of the dwelling environment and to the experience of nature. A key feature of the domestic garden is that it is considered as an outdoor extension of the dwelling that affords casual leisure. So, public and private green spaces are not just simple substitutes for each other.Support OTBOTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen