In-home childcare services are used by nuclear families that find it difficult to routinely call on grandparents for aid. Services are not used only when a parent present. In two-thirds of the usage, parents are absent. Services are usually performed in the living/dining room (LD), the center of family life. Among these, in many one-layer dwellings (apartment houses), a room connected to the LD is used as a bedroom, and this room is routinely used together with the LD as one large room. Therefore, during in-home childcare services, even the bedroom is often seen by the cooperators, a third party.
The “withholding of information” is an important privacy factor during usage of in-home childcare services, and this point is supported by the details of spatial manipulation before services like dealing with futons, moving items, including valuables, and closing doors to rooms to be kept hidden, etc.
Feelings of privacy being invaded can be classified into three types: manifest-type, latent-type, and relaxed-type. Manifest-type is characteristically often seen in two-layer dwellings (maisonette type apartment house and detached two-layer homes) and latent-type and relaxed-type are often seen in one-layer dwellings. Similarly, there is a tendency for the privacy demand to keep a location hidden to be more manifest in two-layer dwellings.
Due to how the service is used, stronger screening of locations and spatial adjustments are observed when the helper cannot be monitored, such as when the parents are absent. In addition, in terms of feelings of privacy being invaded in one-layer dwellings, there are more cases of latent and relaxed types when parents are absent and when the service is used infrequently.
Through the aforementioned, it was clarified that each of the three processes in the acquisition of privacy as indicated by Altman — demand, adjustment, and achievement — are influenced by social factors, such as the ways the childcare services are used, as well as the physical factors of the living space depending on whether it is one-layer or two-layer and by flow planning (figure 3). The noteworthy point is that the results are difficult to explain according to conventional functional differentiation. This is because the feeling of privacy being invaded is not necessarily reduced and even becomes more strongly manifest in two-layer dwellings in which functional differentiation has been achieved by placing the bedroom, which requires a high level of screening, on a different floor than the LD. On the other hand, in one-layer dwellings in which functional differentiation is difficult to achieve, timing due to straightening up and coping through one's mental attitude are considered, and as a result, in many cases, the feeling of privacy being invaded is alleviated or eliminated. In addition, as a new discovery, it was indicated that one's sense of privacy while in the dwelling is also affected by the design of the space around the dwelling. This is because there is a tendency for the feeling of privacy being invaded to become manifest when the spatial planning does not provide the options of either interacting with or blocking the vision of neighbors, even in two-layer dwellings in which functional differentiation has been achieved.
