Wellbeing at home: a mediation analysis of residential satisfaction, comfort, and home attachment

In the study of residential satisfaction in architectural design different physical comfort domains have received the most attention. But with this comfort-driven approach, residential satisfaction is reduced to a psychophysical relationship. Adding psychological substance to the design process, the paper argues that a distinction should be made between residential satisfaction and home attachment and that we need to consider home attachment as a mediator variable for comfort. The aim of the paper is to empirically assess whether the mediation, if it exists at all, is partial or complete. Distinguishing different forms of comfort, a set of alternative structural equation models are tested with data from a 14-nation population survey in Europe. The result of the model tests is that our wellbeing at home comes in two forms-satisfaction and attachment-and that there is partial as well as complete mediation of home attachment on satisfaction depending on the kind of comfort studied.