A Mixed Approach on Resilience of Spanish Dwellings and Households during COVID-19 Lockdown

ABSTRACT

The confinement by COVID-19 has meant a re-reading of housing for Spanish households, resulting in the only available and safe space to carry out daily activity. This complex phenomenon has generated a completely different way of inhabiting it, as well as of relating to domestic spaces. For this reason, the home perception and its characteristics must be evaluated, highlighting those perceived as deficiencies, or as preferences in such an unusual context as lockdown, where the experience was different depending on the dwelling characteristics, and the family in question. To deepen in this double perception home-dwelling, a mixed method was used, with two online forms. The first is a quantitative questionnaire, while the second asks the participants for photographs and narratives about such images. More than 1800 surveys and 785 qualitative responses were obtained. From both approaches, the joint discourse arose, allowing an exploratory analysis of the current situation of the Spanish residential park, and the resilience demonstrated in this period by both households and their usual dwellings. This study should facilitate the development of new proposals on housing in contexts similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.