Abstract
This study was designed to explore elders' and their family caregivers' collective experience of place within an assisted living center. Using an ethnographic approach, data were collected through participant observation, interviews, and focus groups. This study found key features of the assisted living center that most influenced residents' and family caregivers' phenomenological experience of place. These features included the characteristics, experiences, and meanings that participants attributed to the assisted living center's structure, physical nature, sociocultural nature, and temporal-occupational nature. In this place, occupational forms stood out as important, naturally occurring features of place that, over time, helped characterize the place's temporal-occupational nature. Occupational performance pointed to people's experience of that place.
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