What about your locality? Life-course differences in experiencing and perceiving residential neighbourhoods

Mentor: RNDr. Lucie Pospíšilová, Ph.D. 

The project is supported by the Charles University grant scheme START Programme under no. START/SCI/119.

Annotation 

The project focuses on life-course differences in how residents experience, perceive and are satisfied with their residential neighbourhoods. It aims to approach the topic from perspectives of three population groups in various life-course stages and living in distinct neighbourhood types (children from suburbs, young families from housing estates, older adults from the inner city). The life-course approach was selected given the fact that attitudes towards the residential environment differ among life-course phases, especially in the context of housing careers and behaviour, lifestyle choices and preferences changing due to accelerating societal changes. The topic is analysed by examining residents’ functional and emotional ties with various neighbourhood attributes in their residential surroundings. The project focuses on the Prague Metropolitan Area and adopts a qualitative methodology of data collection and analysis (semi-structured interviews). Understanding people’s subjective evaluation of their residential environment is seen as a key element for understanding the evolution of contemporary cities as well as for creating quality plans for their future development.

Project aims

A neighbourhood serves as a context for the resident's everyday life (Creswell 2009). Residents experience the neighbourhood through functional and emotional ties they develop towards various neighbourhood attributes. Functional links develop through everyday activities, such as the utilization of neighbourhood amenities (services, parks etc.), interaction with neighbours or behaviour in public spaces (Lewicka 2011). Emotional links include subjective feelings residents associate with neighbourhood attributes, such as a sense of community support (Forrest & Kearns 2001), a sense of belonging (Pinkster 2016), or familiarity with places (Paton 2014). In sum, immediate residential surroundings remain an important feature of quality of life (Hur & Morrow-Jones 2008), despite the growing importance of other places and spaces in an individual's everyday life (Lewicka 2011). Therefore, understanding how people experience and perceive their physical and social surroundings is essential to understand their neighbourhood and overall residential satisfaction, and how contemporary cities develop (Bonaiuto et al. 1999).

However, people have dissimilar attitudes and demands towards their residential environment. Therefore, the nature of their functional and emotional neighbourhood ties and satisfaction may vary according to individual characteristics such as social status, gender, ethnicity or life course position. In this project, we focus on variations between life-course stages as the current context of accelerating societal, demographic and economic changes has a particular influence on housing careers and behaviour, lifestyle choices and preferences, which in turn influence neighbourhood perception and satisfaction (Ilmonen 2016). At the same time, particular neighbourhood context impacts upon residents’ links with localities. These may be specific in post-socialist cities with fragmented urban development being to a certain extent dissimilar to the Anglophone context (Sýkora & Bouzarovski 2012). This may further reformulate neighbourhood links of residents in certain life-course stages. 

The project aims to examine how various residential groups experience, perceive and are satisfied with their neighbourhoods. Specifically, we analyse individuals' functional and emotional links to residential surroundings in different life-course stages living in different neighbourhoods (see methodology). This allows us to examine the topic from various perspectives leading to a comprehensive knowledge of the complex person-place relation.

Accordingly, we pose one main research question followed by two subquestions:

How do distinct life-course groups living in different neighbourhood types experience and perceive their neighbourhood and how does it influence their residential satisfaction?

• How are residents functionally and emotionally tied with their neighbourhoods?
• How do their functional and emotional ties with the neighbourhood contribute to their residential satisfaction?

Methodology

The set objectives (defined in Project aims) will be fulfilled using qualitative research methodology, which is considered the most suitable way for capturing people's experiences and perceptions. Specifically, the project analyses 90 in-depth semi-structured interviews with three distinct population groups of the Prague Metropolitan Area to evaluate life-course differences in experiencing and perceiving the residential and social environment and residential satisfaction. The interviewees are selected from 3 life-course groups living in 3 distinct types of neighbourhoods:

• children living with parents but mostly independent in their daily activities (ca 12-17 years old) and living in a suburb;
• young adults with small children (ca 25-44) living in a housing estate;
• older adults whose children have grown up and no longer live at home (‘empty nesters’, ca over 55) living in a gentrifying inner-city neighbourhood.

The neighbourhood types were selected as typical for post-socialist urban development, and according to potential challenges the selected life-course groups may face in these neighbourhoods (children having limited possibilities for everyday activities in suburbs, young adults establishing families in socialist-era housing estates facing various physical and social problems, older adults losing ties due to gentrification of their neighbourhood). 

Potential participants will be initially contacted using social networks (researchers' contacts, Facebook groups etc.) and additionally, the snowball sampling method will be initialized.  The interviews will be conducted mainly during summer and autumn 2021. In autumn and winter 2021 it is planned to analyze the data and subsequently to work on the project ́s outputs (see Expected outcomes).

The interview topics will be divided into thematic parts. The first part of the interview will establish a closer relationship with the participant. This section will therefore include general questions about participant's characteristics, place of residence, length of stay etc. The second part will be devoted to questions about their everyday use of the neighbourhood (functional and emotional links). The interviews will end with easier, closing-type questions.

The conducted interviews will be recorded, anonymised, transcribed (by externists) and analysed. Subsequently, Braun and Clarke ́s (2006) thematic analysis including six pre-set phases will be utilized. Therefore, the analysis will involve familiarization with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the final text. The interviews will be coded using an open coding system enabling a deeper engagement with the data and literature. During the analysis, we will try to go beyond the semantic content of the data to identify the underlying ideas, assumptions, conceptualizations and ideologies (latent level of analysis). The analysis will be performed using the Atlas.ti.