Experience and Sense of Home in Oldest – Old Retirement Home Residents from Zagreb, Croatia

Recent research on aging focus mainly on the experiences of spaces and places in late life. The retirement home has a dual spatial nature as an institution and as a home, producing a mixture of institutional and homelike atmosphere. Private life there is concentrated in limited space, so there are numerous environmental, social and personal characteristics that affect the perceptions of space and home life of elderly residents. The presentation is part of the interdisciplinary project ˝Health, cultural, and biological determinants of longevity: anthropological perspective on survival in very old age - HECUBA˝ (HRZZ IP-2018-01-2497). We show the results of an extensive anthropological survey conducted in 2007/09 in 13 retirement homes in Zagreb, encompassing 310 persons (25.5% males) without dementia (according to Folstein test scores), aged 85 - 101 years. The Quality of Life Questionnaire included structured questions and scales, along with open-ended questions. The aim of this study was to determine the contribution of psychosocial factors to the life satisfaction in old persons, predominantly based on analyses of the responses to the open-ended questions. We identified and interpreted the following effects of the living environment on old persons' life satisfaction: perceptions of home space (private and semi-private residents' rooms, shared spaces, semi-public areas), advantages and disadvantages of home space and levels of privacy, the daily use of the space through participation in a variety of activities. In addition, we focused on the respondents' attitudes and emotions towards their "own home" and activities from their previous home-life (memories, regrets, nostalgia).