Path towards home: Exploring pathways to the development of a sense of home in residential care settings in China

To understand different pathways leading to older adults' sense of home in residential care environments in China.This research adopted the qualitative comparative analysis method to analyse data from 29 interviews. Qualitative comparative analysis is an analytic strategy to systematically analyse potential causal pathways in small-to-medium-sized qualitative datasets.Findings uncovered four different pathways that older adults followed in their process of constructing a sense of home in residential care environments in China.This study adds to the body of literature by analysing how a sense of home in residential care environments can be achieved with pathways that contain a combination of sets of necessary, substitutive and absent conditions. It concludes that even though older adults may not live at home, they may achieve a sense of home by the joint effort at institutional, social and personal levels that facilitates older adults to find a sense of home.