Coping with Residential Life

A Reconsideration through M-GTA

Abstract

Abstract: Studying how residents perceive the residential environment and live their lives by compromise with residence leads to understand their recognition and coping with the world itself. The present study adopted qualitative method to reconsider such a wide, complex, and multi-layered phenomenon of the residential environment recognition. In-depth interviews were held with 16 Japanese participants. The subjects were mainly asked about impressions and evaluations of their present residential environments, centering on his/her house. The Modified Grounded Theory Approach (M-GTA) was utilized for analyzing data because it enables researcher to reveal clearly the common structures among cases. Through the analysis with M-GTA, 23 concepts were extracted, and from these concepts a common structure was identified as: one core category “Recognition and Evaluation of Residential Environment” fulfills a problem discovery function, and one category “Coping with Environment” plays a problem solving role, and another core category “View of Residential Life” leads to comprehensive grasp of circumstances and adjusts other two categories to function effectively. Furthermore, the significance and the limitation of this research were also discussed.