‘It’s normal to have damp’: Using a qualitative psychological approach to analyse the lived experience of energy vulnerability among young adult households

Abstract

Seeking to promote methodological innovation in fuel poverty research, this paper reflects on the use of a novel qualitative psychological approach known as interpretative phenomenological analysis. The benefits and limitations of this methodological approach are discussed within a detailed account of findings from a small-scale study undertaken in Salford, UK. Contributing to an existing gap in the existing evidence base, the research focused on the lived experience of young adult households: a demographic group identified as being disproportionately more likely to be living in fuel poverty compared to any other age group. Three emergent themes were identified: 'establishing the independent home', 'threats to home comfort' and 'energy and coping'. Multiple references to conditions typical of fuel poverty were disclosed, such as: self-disconnection, energy debts, cold homes and unrelenting challenges with damp and laundry practices. 'Vulnerability' mostly consumed narratives of past experience, with participants discussing the present and future with positive affectivity. Implications for further research are explored, including the potential to more effectively target support by reframing current discourse away from one centred on 'vulnerability'.

How the Concept of Dignity Is Relevant to the Study of Energy Poverty and Energy Justice

“…More recently, Longhurst and Hargreaves (2019) presented a pioneering study on emotional engagements with energy poverty. This study is part of a recent rise in interest in the lived experience of energypoor households (e.g., Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015;Butler and Sherriff, 2017;Middlemiss et al, 2018;Willand and Horne, 2018;Yoon and Saurí, 2019). In most of this literature on the lived experience of energy-poor households, the actual material deprivation, and the situations of the household members as well as their coping strategies are again the focus.…”

Encountering energy precarity: Geographies of fuel poverty among young adults in the UK

“…Energy studies have rarely entered into a dialogue with the broader body of scholarship on young people, where the established literature on the “geographies of youth” (Skelton & Valentine, ) has itself shown relatively less interest in young adults (Evans, ; Hörschelmann & Refaie, ). As a whole, therefore, there is a significant gap in existing geographical knowledge about how young adults both need and use different energy services in the home, particularly when it comes to the relationship between socio‐economic hardship and their specific residential patterns (but see Butler & Sherriff, ).…”

Using Twitter to Explore (un)Healthy Housing: Learning from the #Characterbuildings Campaign in New Zealand

“…Of the available platforms, Twitter is particularly useful for this, given that users tend to be younger than other social media users [ 11 ], though within our sample, a few nostalgic tweets reminiscing on previous residences indicated that some tweeters may have been older. Particularly in fuel poverty literature, the experiences of young people living in hard to heat and poor quality dwellings have been neglected [ 39 , 63 , 64 , 65 ].…”