Exploring intergenerational experiences of home, community, & connection
Led by Dr Heather Emond
Intergenerational living is about much more than different generations sharing a home. It can include families living together, relatives living nearby, neighbours supporting one another, and communities creating spaces where people of different ages can meet, contribute, and feel they belong.
The Intergenerational Living strand of the Changing Intergenerational Relationships (CIR) project explored how these relationships were experienced across Stirling and Clackmannanshire. We were interested in how people’s homes, communities, family relationships, housing decisions, and connections to place shaped the ways generations lived alongside and supported one another.
By bringing together life-history interviews and community workshops we explored intergenerational living from a range of perspectives. This allowed us to explore intergenerational connections more broadly, including those within families, between neighbours, and through wider community life, as well as the ways housing, care, culture, finances, local history, and everyday experiences shaped them.
What is a life-history interview?
Many research interviews focus on one issue at a time. A life-history interview takes a wider view.
Rather than asking people only about their current home, family arrangements, or experience of care, this approach invites them to reflect on their lives as a whole. Participants might discuss their early life, family relationships, education, work, housing history, health, caring responsibilities, local communities, and hopes for the future.
This matters because intergenerational living can mean very different things at different points in life. A young person may live in, or return to, the family home during education, work transitions, relationship changes, or a period when independent housing is not affordable or available. Family members may provide childcare, practical help, financial support, or help navigating housing decisions. An older person may receive support from relatives or neighbours while trying to retain independence. People may also build important relationships across generations through volunteering, community groups, sport, heritage, and shared local spaces.
Using life histories allowed us to understand these experiences in context. It also showed how people’s past homes, family relationships, housing resources, and experiences of community could shape what they needed, expected, or hoped for in the future.
- Participants shared experiences from across a wide range of ages, family circumstances, household arrangements, communities, and housing situations. Their stories included experiences of:
- Living with parents, children, grandparents, partners, or wider family, and receiving support through wider social networks.
- Moving away from, returning to, or remaining close to family and local communities.
- Providing or receiving practical, emotional, financial, and housing-related support across generations.
- Caring for relatives, balancing care with work or other responsibilities, and negotiating independence, risk, and family expectations.
- Renting privately, living in social housing, owning a home, and navigating the costs, responsibilities, and uncertainties associated with different housing arrangements.
- Taking part in volunteering, mentoring, local groups, sport, heritage, recreation, and other activities that connected people of different ages.
What is a community workshop?
A community workshop brings people together to explore ideas, compare experiences, and imagine what could change. Unlike an interview, which focuses on an individual’s story, workshops make space for discussion between people with different backgrounds, ages, experiences, and perspectives.
For CIR, workshops provided an opportunity to bring questions emerging from the life-history interviews back to the communities they came from. We asked participants whether the findings reflected their own experiences, where they needed to be refined, and what could help to create more connected, inclusive places for people at every stage of life. Key topics included:
- How people of different ages live together, support one another, and make housing decisions across the life course.
- How local history, family relationships, community spaces, heritage, recreation, and environmental concerns shape people’s connection to place.
Participants discussed where these findings reflected their own communities, where they did not, and what might help people of different ages to connect and take part in local life.
Our Key Findings
Intergenerational living is often understood as several generations sharing a home, but our research showed that it can take many different forms. It may involve relatives living nearby and offering regular support, families sharing financial or practical resources, neighbours looking out for one another, or people of different ages coming together through local activities and community spaces. These relationships can be deliberately planned, but they can also grow informally over time.
For many people, these connections provide vital support through the changes and transitions of everyday life. They can help a young person establish themselves, support a parent balancing work and care, enable an older person to remain connected to their community, or create opportunities to share practical skills, local knowledge and life experience, across generations.
But these forms of support were not available to everyone. People’s ability to live close to family, receive care, take part in their community, or make choices about their homes was shaped by money, housing, transport, local services, health, and the relationships around them.
Home changes across the life course
People’s experiences of intergenerational living were rarely fixed. They changed as people moved through education, work, relationships, parenthood, caring, ill health, bereavement, and later life. Participants’ housing histories, previous experiences of living independently or with family, and expectations for the future all influenced what they wanted, and what was possible.
Intergenerational living took many forms. Some participants described adult children moving back home, relatives living together, family members living close enough to provide regular support, or temporary arrangements during periods of change. Support could also take place across separate households, through help with mortgages, rents, house moves, repairs, maintenance, storage, or decisions about housing.
These forms of support could make an important difference when people were establishing themselves, raising families, managing care, or adapting to health and ageing. But they were not available equally. Some people could draw on family resources, housing knowledge, or practical help at key points in their lives, while others had few such options. In this way, different forms of housing support could build on one another, reinforcing the inequalities between people who could access support and those who could not.
Participants also discussed the potential of housing and community initiatives designed to bring generations together. Shared spaces, adapted homes, and the co-location of services could support connection, mentoring, and mutual support. Yet participants stressed that these ideas needed more than a building or shared facility. They needed to be accessible, carefully coordinated, shaped with local people, and supported over time.
Living together isn't always easy
Intergenerational living could provide security, companionship, financial help, and opportunities to share skills, experience, and culture. But it was not always possible, wanted, or sustainable.
Participants described how limited space, difficult family relationships, bereavement, separation, changes in household circumstances, benefit rules, tenancy conditions, and conflicting expectations could make shared living difficult. Some people did not have family or social networks they could turn to; for others, these relationships had been affected by trauma, estrangement, or care experience.
This helps to explain why shared living cannot be approached as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ answer to housing pressures or changing care needs. Successful intergenerational living depends on space, resources, relationships, and choice. For some people it offered important support; for others, it was not available or did not feel safe, workable, or appropriate.
Support, care, and independence
Participants described care as a central part of intergenerational life. Families and wider social networks could provide practical help, emotional support, childcare, transport, companionship, advocacy, and assistance with housing decisions. For some older people, this support helped them remain connected to others and retain a sense of control over daily life.
At the same time, care was not always straightforward or evenly shared. Participants spoke about how caring could become intensive when combined with work, health needs, childcare, or other family responsibilities. There could also be assumptions about who would take on the greatest share of care, particularly when one family member lived closest to an older relative.
The findings also showed the importance of balancing support with independence. Older people may want help while still making their own decisions about home, care, and risk. Younger relatives may be concerned about safety while trying to respect those wishes. These tensions were not unusual; they were part of how families and social networks negotiated care over time.
Community, heritage, and belonging
Intergenerational relationships also developed beyond the home. Participants spoke about how local history, family stories, volunteering, sport, youth work, heritage, recreation, and community groups could bring people together and create a stronger sense of belonging.
Many people described deep attachment to the region: its industrial heritage, natural environment, shared memories, and local identities. This attachment often encouraged people to volunteer, mentor younger generations, preserve local assets, participate in community life, and seek to make their area better for the future.
Participants also recognised that this connection was not equally available, talking at length about the different pressures that could make it difficult to remain connected to a place or take part in community life. Families had become more geographically dispersed, with younger people sometimes leaving the region for education or work, while an ageing population raised concerns around care, loneliness, and living alone. The closure or cost of community spaces and activities, limited transport, financial pressures, health problems, caring responsibilities, social isolation, and feeling unwelcome could all make it harder for people to participate. Some younger people were seen as being overlooked or as having few routes into community life, particularly where activities cost money, local assets were difficult to reach, or there were limited places to spend time safely with peers and adults.
These findings suggest that community connection is not created simply by bringing people of different ages into the same room. It depends on accessible spaces, affordable activities, opportunities to contribute, and support for people to attend and remain involved. It also depends on recognising the value of local knowledge, heritage, mentoring, and the informal relationships that already exist within communities.
