'FEEL YOURSELF AT HOME!' PROJECTIVE, ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF EMOTIONAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS HOME SOURCE

The early notions of place-identity and place attachment had implied an unambiguously positive affect that led to much controversy later on. In the nineties research was mostly influenced by emphasis on positive affect, this, however, created tension between environmental psychological theories of home and empirical applications. Recently, researchers tend to focus on situations where positive affect to home place-identity is lacking for some reason, and strongly negative feelings prevail due to troubles and traumatic experiences of family life. Recent studies conclude that homes with negative experiences can become psychologically just as meaningful as places where needs are met in a positive way. Thus, emotional relationship to the home is essentially complex, sometimes ambivalent. In this paper an exploratory study of psychological attitudes towards the home is reported, with a special emphasis on the novel method of projective participatory snapping; In this procedure people participating in the study were asked to take pictures of their own homes and then to evaluate these according to given dimensions. The results of the analysis of qualitative data related to home photos and related procedures are discussed