Housing Adjustment As a Symptom of Housing Dissatisfaction: Call for an Integrated Approach to Theory Building

Housing Adjustment is a set of creative human activities that take place to meet various housing needs. Thus far, numerous studies have given attention to speculate a typology of those activities on an empirical base. Overall, though, little is known about its theoretical underpinning, due to the independent nature of each individual study in interpreting differences in conclusions. This study examines and compares results from two previous studies on housing adjustment. Previous research on housing adjustment suggests that, other than household and housing characteristics, housing satisfaction as an intervening variable is deeply associated with the choice of housing adjustment involved in mobility, home improvement, or cognitive adaptation. The two studies used similar theoretical schemes, asked similar questions, yet one sample consisted of Korean American residents and the other sample was poor housing residents in Korea. This study shows that differences in sample characteristics lead to a strong discrepancy in interpreting Speare's (1974) satisfaction theory of housing adjustment. For Korean Americans, housing satisfaction turned out to be a good predictor of housing adjustment preference, while it is not the case for poor housing residents in Korea. This implies that findings of any Single study can not be generalized directly to the population as a whole. Thus, continued effort should be made to compare specific findings from various research studies, seeking explanations for differences in conclusions. Theory can be legitimately built and strengthened in this integrated manner.