Navigating Conviviality and Co-Viviality: Persons With Intellectual Disabilities and Mental Health Problems' Home Making in Residential Care.

Abstract

Background: Recent numbers of the share of residential services in the Flemish care reveal that implementing personal budgets did not ignite a large-scale departure from residential care and that the use of full-time residential care even increased. Despite incentives to leave residential care, people with intellectual disabilities and mental health problems (PIDMHP) in particular continue to keep living there (or choose to keep living there). Gaining insight into the possibilities PIDMHP living in residential care have for making a home is of importance in the ever-continuing inquiry and discussion of how to contribute to enhancing service quality and spatial living conditions for PIDMHP.

Method: This contribution is built around shadowing activities with 20 PIDMHP living in a residential care facility in Flanders (Belgium), as a form of one-on-one ethnography, coupled with go-along interviews with 12 professional carers.

Results: PIDMHP showcases a myriad of socio-spatial strategies relating to co-viviality and conviviality to make sense of 'a good home' in residential care. These strategies emerge within power dynamics and, in the process, are not always recognised by professionals as meaningful/significant or supported to come into being.

Conclusions: The conducts of the residents and support workers are not passive by-products of the building design but constitute active shaping of that living environment themselves by means of socio-spatial strategies. The strategies employed by residents are embedded within rules and structures established by professionals. These power dynamics within which 'home-making' takes shape are especially relevant when considering the transformation of residential care facilities and challenging prevailing institutional logics.