Browsing by Subject "everyday life"

The experienced everyday life, importance of feeling comfortable in one's own neighbourhood and attachment to place have been popular research topics in recent years. One important reason for this is that feeling of belonging is important for everyday wellbeing. Taking care of the neighbourhood is also beneficial for the society. Active moving especially in the metropolitan area rises questions are residential areas filling the demands of a good neighbourhood. The aim of the study is to find out which factors make residential area a good place to live from resident's point of view and how residents experience their everyday life in the area. The aim is also to consider the importance of experiential knowledge can be exploited in regional planning. The research area in this study is Matinkylä neighbourhood in the city of Espoo. This is a qualitative study and the research material consists of five interviews made in Matinkylä including observation in the research area. All the interviewees live in the area. The interviews were made using the Go along-method that means walking with the participant in the research area while interviewing. Walking route consists of places that are important in the everyday life. The research material was categorized and analysed by using discourse analysis. One of the main results in this study is finding three criteria that are needed to feel comfortable in one's own neighborhood. The found criteria are the importance of the social relations in the area, functioning public transport and good accessibility to local services and the closeness of green spaces in the area. The places of everyday life contains in addition to home, local services and recreational areas. Analysis also tells that residents divide the neighbourhood in smaller areas on the basis of the areas appearance and how the resident experiences the area. Dividing the areas leads in a situation where some of the areas start to feel distant or even unsafe for the residents and it effects the ways of using the whole neighbourhood. According to interviews Matinkylä is a good place to live, but when observing the ranges of attachment the attachment is strongest in the area close to home. Including for example home street, and other places situated near home. This study verifies the importance of neighbourhood attachment to the residents. The importance of neighborhood areas motivate planners to develop high quality residential areas to improve the quality of life. Experiential knowledge collected from the residents brings added value to residential planning by giving planners information they could not have from anywhere else. Exploiting this kind of information is important especially in the beginning of the planning project. Exploring the neighborhood especially by walking creates a possibility to use the area more diverse and diminish the possible feelings of insecurity in the area. The results suggest that feeling comfortable in the area and attachment to place have strong influence for using the area. Without attachment to place the area may lose its users and its importance.

Aims. Sustainable development has become the most important theme in the development co-operation in the 21st century. Sustainable development is pursued by environmental education among other things. This research rose from the discussion about the meaning of environmental education in developing countries and especially the effect it might have in the environment and society. Nepal and one of its rural private schools was selected as a research object. The themes and questions of the research are: 1. Conceptions of the immediate environment of students and teachers: What does immediate environment mean according to the students and teachers? 2. Students' most important acts in the environment: What kind of effect do the students think they can have on the environment in their everyday life? 3. Teachers' opinions, experiences and methods in environmental education: What do teachers think should be taught to the students in environmental education? What are the teachers actually teaching? What kind of methods are the teachers using while teaching environmental education? Researching the conceptions of immediate environment and acts in the environment gives information about the students' and teachers' relation with the nature in their everyday life and the baseline from which environmental education will be implemented from. Teachers' opinions, experiences and methods in environmental education provide information on the current implementation of the environmental education. Methods. Ethnography was selected as a research method. Before collecting the actual data, a pre-study was conducted. The aim of the pre-study was to specify the research themes and practice the cross-cultural interview as a research method. The actual data was collected in the last week of January 2010 in Dhangadhi, Nepal. The data included twenty-two drawings and captions from the students and one group interview with the teachers. The data was analyzed with brief quantitative analysis and full analysis was done with a qualitative method called content analysis. Results and conclusions. Teachers' and student's conceptions of immediate environment differ from each other. Students saw the immediate environment from the scientific approach while the teachers thought it was more social conception. The interface was found in their own personal environment. This interface is a good baseline for environmental education. The most important acts in the environment for the students were protection towards the environment. The students saw their possibilities to have an influence in the environment through the school. A connection between the school and acting in the environment was evident. In the teachers' opinions and experiences of environmental education, environmental problems and the importance of teaching attitudes and values were found. No logic thematic entities were discovered but the teachers did use different kinds of methods in their teaching. Achieving the international aims for environmental education was very challenging in the research school because of the teachers' lack of information and skills to teach the subject. The context where the school works was also challenging.

Homelessness has been described as a wicked problem due to its complexity and persistence. In the past few decades, Finland has implemented strategies and measures to tackle homelessness and to prevent it. The results have been effective, and homelessness has decreased significantly. However, despite the success of these implementations, there are still thousands of homeless people in Finland who lack a place to call home. As it remains, homelessness is one of the most challenging problems facing Finnish society. In Finland the explanations for the homeless phenomenon have usually wavered between individual characteristics and structural factors. Substance abuse and mental health problems, divorce or a break-up, rent arrears and over-indebtedness are usually highlighted as individual factors for homelessness. In Finland, the most significant structural factor for homelessness is the inadequacy and shortage of affordable rental housing. There is a shortage of affordable housing especially in the Helsinki metropolitan area, where homelessness nationally is concentrated. This ethnographic study approaches the homeless phenomenon in Finland by exploring the daily lives of two homeless men who also suffer from substance use problems. The study is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the men’s pathways to homelessness and factors that have contributed to these. This is followed by the men’s conceptualisations of home, what it means to them, and how they make home as homeless people. The second part of the results shed light on the men’s survival strategies, daily activities and their encounters with fellow street people. The data, which consists of fieldwork observations and unstructured interviews, were collected between autumn 2015 and winter 2016. Thematic analysis was applied to analyse the data. The results show that the men’s pathways to homelessness are complex, stemming from both individual and structural factors. Troubled childhoods, lack of education and employment, low levels of income, bad credit, lack of supporting social networks and addiction problems contribute to the men’s situations as homeless people. However, this study shows that many of these factors that are usually considered as individual, are actually more connected to structural factors such as insufficient level of social security and inadequate access to social and health care. The study illustrates that people who are in vulnerable positions to begin with, are more likely to be exposed to these structural factors, the main factor being the lack affordable housing. The participants’ conceptualisations of home show that not all housing is considered home. In adverse circumstances home can be for example a staircase or prison. Furthermore, the research findings show that the everyday life of a homeless person is occupied with attempts to meet basic needs such as eating, washing and finding a place to stay. Much of the men’s daily lives are also devoted to making money, which is usually acquired by stealing. The results indicate that the men’s social contacts consist mainly of people who use substances or are otherwise in similar situations, though encounters with fellow people are not always positive and the threat of violence is often present.

Motivation. The motivation for this research was to analyse the everyday life of Tove Jansson´s Moomin family through the components of the activity theory. The study is theoretically based on the concepts of everyday life and family research on home, family, the everyday life and division of la-bour between family members, and on the Korvela´s (2003) home economic based interpretations of Yrjö Engeströms´s (1987) activity system diagram. The homemaking activities of the Moomin family are looked at through these concepts and interpretations. The aim of the study is to analyse the repre-sentation of everyday life in a work of fiction by using the methods of scientific research, and gather up a description of everyday life which can be compared to theoretical framework. The research question is: What is the activity system of the Moomin family? Methods. The research data was distinguished from the first two chapters of the book Comet in Moominland and includes 21 situations where homemaking activities of the Moomin family are de-scribed. The situations were distinguished from the story through following criteria: Two or more members of the family must be in active interaction with each other, or at least one member whose activity constructs home as a physical and emotional space. The research was directed by the research data, and elements of activity system – object, subject, mediating artefacts, rules, community and di-vision of labour – were used as a keys to gather and analyse data and to examine the results. The re-search data was reconstructed in table format, which helped to distinguish the everyday life activities and the possible repetitive activities of the Moomin family from the data. The results were collated with the theoretical framework, which outlined the everyday life system of the Moomin family. Results and conclusions. The Moomin family life is the like any family with children. Moominmam-ma carries the expressive role and main responsibility of the homemaking chores. She is the heart, which keeps everyday life running fluidly on all levels. Moominpappa fills the instrumental role in the family. He takes care of construction work requiring physical strength, and ensures the safety of the family by placing himself between the family´s operational environment and the outside world. The son, Moomintroll, and adopted son, Sniff, live everyday life of children, developing their identi-ties through play and shared interactional relationship. The boys´ growing independency expands the family´s operational environment and drives the family´s everyday life. By taking both children in equal consideration both through actions and communications, Moominmamma in developing a sense of community between herself and Sniff and the rest of the family. The arrival of the Muskrat brings with it the end of the world, which represents a new object to the family’s everyday activities. The family reacts both as individuals and as a community, but finally they respond to the challenges and changes in their operational environments as a co-operating unity.