Among homeless people using drugs, a permanent place to live can be difficult to find. Homelessness or living in traumatic home environments might cause the experiences of displacement, which may weaken the possibility to attach to a new place emotionally and create the personal sense of home without support. In housing support work, it is possible to help formerly homeless people in vulnerable life situations to settle in their new living places. This study concentrates on client–worker interaction during 12 home visits recorded in 2017 in a Finnish Housing First-based floating support project for people injecting drugs. Ethnomethodologically oriented interaction analysis and geographies of home and home-based care are applied to examine how the workers and clients discuss clients’ attachments to the places they live in and how the workers construct a sense of home in collaboration with the clients. The study highlights how the workers responded both sensitively and productively to the clients’ needs and wants through collaborated actions and conversations that complement each other in the clients’ home spaces. For example, the workers skilfully made the clients’ complex housing issues understandable, aligned with the clients’ views, promoted their right for self-determination and gave positive assessments in regard to the flat. These kinds of interactional approaches were utilised to support the clients in their construction of a sense of home and thus to strengthen their abilities to form an attachment to their current living places, which can be seen as important factors to prevent clients’ future homelessness.
Constructing a sense of home in floating support for people using drugs
