Residential Transitions in Supported Living: Experiences of Adults With Intellectual Disabilities and Parents.

The study is small: five adults with intellectual disabilities and eight parents were interviewed, plus four adults in a focus group. There is no way to know how far these accounts reflect other people's experience. Everyone lived in, or had family living in, the same kind of municipality-run housing with staff on site around the clock, in one semi-rural Norwegian municipality. Different housing models and different parts of the country may produce different accounts. The sample was mostly women, there was only one parent and adult child who both took part, and only about half the participants had an ongoing process or had moved in the last five years, so memories of past moves may have faded or shifted. About half the data came from people with varying communication and language skills, which required simpler questions and some filling in of context by the researchers, and the authors note that social desirability may have shaped what people said. The researchers tried and failed to recruit parents into separate focus groups, so parents' views come only from individual interviews. The first author had worked for over a decade in co-located supported housing, a background the authors say may have influenced the analysis.

The authors report no funding and declare no conflicts of interest.

Do not read this as evidence that co-located supported housing causes the problems described, or that some other arrangement would work better. It is a qualitative account of what a small group of people in one Norwegian municipality described. No outcomes were measured and no types of housing were compared.