Navigating Conviviality and Co-Viviality: Persons With Intellectual Disabilities and Mental Health Problems' Home Making in Residential Care.
Adults with ID and mental health needs create home in small, hidden ways that staff should notice and protect.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Benoot et al. (2026) spent time inside residential homes for adults who have both intellectual disability and mental health needs.
The team watched and talked with residents to learn how these adults try to make the place feel like their own home.
They used ethnography: hanging out, taking notes, and mapping tiny daily moves people make with space and objects.
What they found
Residents craft a sense of home through small, quiet acts staff often miss.
Examples: rearranging furniture, hiding favorite snacks, or choosing a special chair.
These moves help people feel safe and in control, even when the building still feels like an institution.
How this fits with other research
Watson et al. (2007) showed that supported living beats group homes on social-inclusion scores.
Toon adds the resident view: even inside traditional homes, people still fight for belonging.
Chou et al. (2010) found staff make substitute choices by gut, not law.
Toon flips the lens, showing residents also shape daily life, just under the staff radar.
Together the papers reveal a tug-of-war: staff decide "what’s best" while residents quietly redesign the same space.
Why it matters
If you run or work in a residence, slow down and look for these tiny home-making acts.
Spot them, name them aloud, and add staff support instead of wiping them out with blanket rules.
Letting residents keep their sofa corner or snack stash can cut agitation and boost dignity without costing a dime.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Walk the living room, ask each resident "What here is yours?" and help them keep or display that item.
02At a glance
03Original 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.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2026 · doi:10.1111/jir.70056