ABSTRACT
The main publication of the Leeds University study of sheltered housing (Butler, Oldman and Greve, 1983) has focused on a range of social policy issues. Our understanding has been enhanced by the authors’ illuminating discussion of what they see as the seven conventional rationales for providing sheltered housing. But while no one would dispute the importance of these issues, there remain other questions of considerable sociological interest relating particularly to the tenants of sheltered housing and how they function in their social world and these could not satisfactorily be answered in the short compass of the seventeen page chapter devoted to them in the book. In this paper, I examine some of these questions by reference to intellectually antecedent studies and describe a forthcoming research project among Anchor sheltered housing tenants which may cast some light on them.
