Browsing by Subject "seniori"

Goals: The purpose of this study is to elucidate the issues that affect the comfort of indivuduals living in a communal senior house. The focus of this study is the communal seniorhouse Kotisatama in Helsinki. My research tasks consist of the following questions: what do the residents think about community living after two years of living experience, and what challenges the residents have experienced in communal housing and what factors affect the overall comfor of a communal senior house. The theoretical part of this thesis who the seniors are, it goes through the stages of aging, and considers the preconditions of a good everyday life in old age. Methods: The study is by nature a so called longitudinal study. I did my Bachelor´s thesis on people who moved to the recently completed Kotisatama in 2016. The aim of the study was to find out the resons why the elderly had chosen a communal senior house as form of housing. In my Master´s thesis, I continued to interview the same people after two years of living experience. The data consists of a group interview conducted at the Senior House Kotisatama, which was attended by five female residents and one couple, and an interview with the architect Kirsti Sivén, who designed Kotisatama senior house. The study was conducted as a qalitative group interview in the spring 2018. The interviews were conducted in the premises of the senior building Kotisatama, and in the architect Sivén´s office. The interviews were audio-recorded and the interview material was transcribed immediately after the interviews. In order to enrich the content of the study, articles on community living, published in the 2014-2018 volumes of the ET-magazine aimed at seniors, were also analysed as a additional data. A total of seventeen of these articles were subjected to a more detailed analysis. This data were analyzed by using qualitative content analysis. Results and conclusions: According to the results, company, safety, exercise opportunities, common hobbies and common eating became the most important issues which increase comfort of living in a communal house. The challenging factors related to living were the heaviness of the kitchen work, the picky and critical attitude towards food and cleaning, as well as the difficulty of making decisions and arguments over parking spaces.