Housing and wellbeing in later life

My research passion concerns the home and how the home environment and neighborhood support or restrict older adults to live their lives the way they prefer. I want to know more about older adults' attachment to homes and neighborhoods, but also how they adjust the home, on their own or via health and social care services, to be able to adapt to health and life changes. Further, could a move to another place impact health, quality of life, and active aging? And what about older adults who age in transitioning neighborhoods? I study these kinds of questions with colleagues at CASE in several projects. I am the principal investigator of the “Older adults living in disadvantaged areas. A mixed methods study on homes, neighborhood transition and wellbeing.” It is an interdisciplinary project where we use in-depth interviews, photo-elicitation, and surveys to capture how transitioning neighborhoods impact wellbeing in later life. I take part in the “Sustain@home” project where we explore how technical staff in housing companies experience and deal with social and health-related issues of older tenants. In RELOC-AGE we investigate how adults 55 years and older reason and plan for how they want to live growing older, and what factors influence relocation.

The Corona pandemic and 70+

As of March 2020, I am leading an interview study, “Suddenly at risk,” where I, with four colleagues, investigate how older adults in Sweden handle and adjust to the restrictions enforced to reduce the spread of the novel Coronavirus. We have conducted in-depth interviews with 17 adults, 70 years and older, on four occasions during the first year of the pandemic. 

Postdoc at Johns Hopkins University, USA

2016-2018 I did a postdoc at the Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Innovative Care in Aging in Baltimore, MD, the USA. Reuters wrote a news article based on one of my studies – you can access it here. My collaboration with Professor Sarah Szanton is still ongoing in a project on how we can reduce falls at home by combing exercise, home modifications, vision screenings, and medication screenings. The project is called LIVE-LIFE and builds on the LIFE project by professor Lindy Clemson in Australia.

Registered Occupational Therapist and lecturer

I am an occupational therapist by training and my current position is as a lecturer (BUL) in gerontology, partly funded by the Ribbingska Foundation. My research is also funded by the Swedish national research councils FORMAS and FORTE. I have formal pedagogic training and teach at the Occupational Therapy program as well as undergraduate and graduate students. 

Ph.D. project

 I graduated in 2014. My Ph.D. project was made within the research center CASE. The aim was to deepen the knowledge on relocation in very old age in two Western European countries (Sweden and Germany). With a focus on person-environment relations concerning housing and health, predictors and consequences of relocation were explored. Also, residential decision-making was explored with a focus on how very old people reason about their home and everyday life in relation to relocation and aging-in-place. Data from the ENABLE-AGE Project was used. The main supervisor was Professor Susanne Iwarsson. Co-supervisors were lecturer Charlotte Löfqvist (LU) and Professor Ines Himmelsbach, Catholic University of Applied Sciences in Freiburg, Germany.