How people think about homes has changed

Identifying where and how mindsets are moving can uncover new opportunities for real world change. Tracking mindsets also helps us to measure the impact of social (or narrative) change efforts.

Talking about Homes, a partnership between FrameWorks UK, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Nationwide Foundation, has made a significant impact on how organisations and key voices in the housing sector communicate about homes.

Since 2020, when the research was undertaken, we’ve also lived through culture-shaping events, such as a change of government, the Covid pandemic, and failures in our housing system laid bare by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and the coroner’s ruling on the death of Awaab Ishak.

In this context, we wondered, have mindsets on homes shifted?

A series of focus groups carried out in 2024 as part of FrameWorks UK’s Moving Mindsets programme generated insight into people’s thinking about homes that we can compare with how people thought about housing in our 2020 research.

This briefing sets out three takeaways about how mindsets on homes have shifted over this four-year period, and what they mean for communicators.