What is Home? Creating a Psychological-Based Framework of Home With Basic Psychological Needs Theory

Abstract

While psychologists regularly study the home environment, they less often study home as a concept, despite the benefits that psychology can both receive from and give to the study of home. The psychological well-being of many peoples cannot be understood without recognizing their integral relation with the concept of home. Likewise, several questions remain in the study of home without unifying answers, including the most essential: What is home? And why is home important to the self? To resolve these tensions, we integrate the qualitative methodologies of metasynthesis and the integrative review to apply basic psychological needs theory and create a psychological-based framework of home. We argue that dwellings satisfy basic physical needs, whereas homes also satisfy basic psychological needs. We use scholarship on home and examples in popular media to argue that prior conceptualizations of home align with the needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. At the same time, we incorporate need strength to argue that not all needs are necessary for a dwelling to be a home, but it instead depends on the needs that the inhabitant values at a given time. We lastly suggest that home can be unmade by the frustration of basic psychological needs. By achieving these goals, we provide a unifying framework for the study of home, enabling a multitude of avenues for the study of home in psychology. We also provide considerations for the importance of our integrative qualitative review methodology, which can be adapted to investigate similarly important research questions in psychology.