Housing Well-Being: An introduction Part I

By Moritz Fedkenheuer & Bernd Wegener 
Photography by Thekla Ehling

In order to avoid dangerous climate change, we have to reduce long-term energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors of our society. As space and water heating in residential buildings account for more than a quarter of our energy consumption, the residential sector plays a key role. Furthermore, residential buildings are among the most inert elements of the energy system. Typically, it takes decades between construction and the first major refurbishment. What we build today strongly determines the energy consumption of the future. Therefore we need to convince today’s homeowners and -builders of the value of energy-efficient refurbishment and help them rethink their behaviour to live in a more energy-efficient manner.  

With this in mind, it is very unfortunate that, for the last few years, the public discourse about low-energy buildings has mainly focused on their environmental benefits, and mostly left out the occupants, their needs and concerns. Many people are sceptical about technical innovations such as modern insulation, mechanical ventilation or home automation, and hesitate to integrate them in their homes. Their concerns are based on health, functional and aesthetical reasons. There is a lack of communication and a lack of information on that topic. What are the consequences of these energy modernisations for the residents? How do houses, in particular highly engineered energy-efficient houses, perform socially and psychologically? What level of subjective well-being do these houses convey? How can we integrate new technical possibilities in a way that improves the liveability and the satisfaction of the occupants? We are convinced that the residential buildings of the future shouldn’t only serve the environment but also bring a benefit to the people. With the Housing Well-Being Inventory (hwbi), our approach to a better understanding of the interaction between buildings and their residents, we hope to find answers to these questions.  

Our work is built on existing approaches, such as post-occupancy evaluation (poe), and tries to enhance them to a wider perspective. Although some of these approaches have already existed for around two decades, they still focus mainly on traditional comfort parameters and fail to take the entire scope of the research subject into account. From their point of view, it is usually taken for granted that particular physical building parameters have positive effects on residents’ well-being. We do not doubt that there are ranges of comfort that should be achieved in a residential building, but we want to study the human-home-interaction from a more holistic perspective, respecting the subjectivity of housing. In this, we are navigating uncharted waters. Empirical research on what residents actually experience and how they evaluate their housing environment in reality is rare. This is particularly true with regard to low-energy buildings and new technologies, as well as the effects these have on the well-being of the residents and their interaction with their homes. 

Extracting the dimensions of housing well-being was the first step, making them measurable had to be the second. Because housing well-being is a theoretical concept, as are its dimensions, we had to develop a measurement method to make these unobservable, latent constructs visible (measuring problem). Therefore we designed a questionnaire that not only asks for overall evaluations but also includes several indicators that measure people’s reactions to the building for each dimension.  

We also took care that the questionnaire covered affective (sympathetic nervous responses; statements of affect), cognitive (perceptual responses; statements of beliefs) and conative (overt actions; statements concerning behaviour) elements, as is common in attitudinal studies.  

As indicators, we use several items (statements) relating to the residents’ perception of and their interaction with the building. They cover a wide range of issues from “I feel at home in my apartment” to “My apartment is in need of renovation” and “Where I sleep, there is too much light.” In the course of the evaluation, the residents rated each statement in the questionnaire on a five-point scale ranging from  
“I fully agree” to “I fully disagree”. By using multiple indicators (at least three items for each dimension) we reduce potential measurement errors and make our results more valid. The set of indicators, which we had developed based on our experiences from the Model Home 2020 project, was subsequently tested in a first pilot study with about 50 participants. This standardised survey helped us to reduce the number of relevant dimensions and indicators in a next step, using factor analysis. This procedure is the standard routine for constructing psychological tests and survey questionnaires.  

Depending on the approval of a research proposal to the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (bbsr) that has been submitted by the non-profit association AktivPlus e. V., we will implement the complete inventory to the residents of selected energy-efficient houses in Germany. In addition, the research project will comprise a large-scale telephone survey of the general German population (n = 1500) so that it will be possible to compare the results of energy-efficient and standard homes. Furthermore, with this general enquiry, we are able to make statements on the condition and configuration of the German housing situation from the users’ perspective: How does housing satisfaction differ among social groups and building types? What are people’s current needs and requests in terms of housing? How do modernisation measures affect the residents’ perceived mental and physical health?  

With this data in hand, we will be able to concretise the benefits of technical and sustainable improvements from the users’ perspective and to identify ways to turn homes into better places for living. We can also take a deeper look into certain social groups and learn more about how the dimensions of housing well-being and the human-home-interaction might differ between them. We hope to find out what people really value – in general but also in particular, depending on the social conditions they live in. By understanding housing well-being in a holistic way, we will be better able to build sustainable houses that not only benefit the climate but also the people, and therefore will be more likely to win the support of the general public.