Home is the bedrock for us living an actualised life, for promotion of wellbeing, stability and community connections. The meanings attributed to home can be complex. We are looking to orientate the narrative away from housing being viewed as an asset class for wealth accumulation to a better understanding of home where individuals may thrive. Our ‘Emotional Insights’ work goes to the heart of this objective. We are making the case for the use of psychological and emotional insights as a basis for re-imagining regulated housing in England.
Feeling at Home project
This research project involved TAROE Trust partnering with Dr Hannah Absalom from the Centre for Urban Wellbeing at the University of Birmingham.
The research phase took place during February to March 2023, and followed on from Hannah’s doctoral research into behavioural insights in the regulated housing sector in England. The original doctoral research identified that there’s potential for emotional/relational insights to inform co-productive processes held together in a social science-informed ‘lab’ model. The insights provided new perspectives on entrenched problems and the lab model connects policy and practice with the real experiences and contexts of tenants.
The Feeling at Home project adopted an open ‘expedition’ style of research, which revolved around one key research question about the possible utility of emotional and psychological insights in the context of housing. The research evolved into exploring the topics of anger and fear through group storytelling and identifying what landlords could do with this emotional understanding. The first report publication from this work is scheduled to be released in early Summer. It will highlight how emotional perspectives reveal much of what is hidden from a rationalised organisation gaze. From accounts of domestic abuse and sexual exploitation to the high levels of anxiety caused by landlord visits to tenants in the home. It also highlighted how emotional encounters between ‘the state’ and citizens and interdisciplinary emotional insights is an under-researched agenda and it is something we wish to explore in our further emotional insights work.
Reports
Building on the ground breaking research that informed our Feeling at Home research project, our first report in our Emotional Insights series, Rethinking Regulated Housing in England: Home as an emotional place can be accessed here:
Respect for All Charter
Our Respect for All Charter and associated services has been developed out of the current professionalisation agenda. Whilst we recognise the significant value that qualifications can have in raising staff skills and knowledge, we felt it was also important that landlords focus on staff “behaviours” and that these are developed and agreed in partnership with tenants.
The Charter has been developed with tenants, and sets out the type of services tenants should be able to expect from their landlord and their stakeholders and contractors.
The Charter provides the core of services that we can offer to landlords and their tenants which explore sets of behaviours that treat tenants with respect.
If you would like to find out more or are interested in us running a session on this, please get in touch.