Designing for Healthy Cognitive Ageing Project: Home Mapping and Interview Data, 2021-2023

The DesHCA project aimed to identify supportive home designs that older people would find acceptable. To contribute to this, the team aimed to find out how older people currently live in their homes and what they find positive and negative about them. The home mapping data collection exercise in DesHCA focused on learning about older people’s experiences of living in their homes as they age. The goal was to gather insights from older people to create a clear picture of what people wanted, needed, and worried about in regards to adapting their home. A creative mapping method was used to explore how older people thought about, felt about, and used their homes. The Participants were re-contacted six months later in Wave 2 of data collection and asked about any changes to their home or health since the first interview.

Participants were asked to create a map of their home (which could include taking photographs, filming, or drawing) and we also interviewed them about their home. Most participants made their creative map during the interview, allowing researchers to ask questions about specific areas and items that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This approach allowed the creative mapping interviews to capture a lot of data on the physical aspects of people’s homes, including what they liked and disliked about their home, what worked well for them, and what they would like to change in the future if they could. They also delved further, looking beyond the building itself to learn about how participants liked to use the different areas in their home, what kind of activities they liked to do there, and how their home had changed over time.

The data consist of:
-16 home maps drawn by 19 participants,
-46 Wave 1 interview transcripts (11 of which involve two people)
-an overview table summarising changes reported since Wave 1 interviews, and
-4 interview transcripts from full Wave 2 interviews.