Understanding Homelessness

Abstract

This paper reviews the literature on understanding homelessness. It criticizes approaches that ignore, distort or diminish the humanity of homeless people, or else, add little to our understanding of that humanity. In particular, it rejects what it calls "epidemiological" approaches, which deny the possibility of agency for homeless people, insofar as those approaches view the situation of those people largely as a "social fact", to be explained in terms of causal variables or "risk factors" of different kinds. It evaluates the concept of homelessness pathways as a way of making sense of research findings on homelessness. It takes issue with realist approaches, insofar as these approaches purport to identify "underlying" mechanisms that "cause" homelessness, and discusses ethnographic approaches focused on "homeless culture". Throughout, the paper emphasizes the need to understand homelessness as multidimensional and storied, and concludes with a plea for more research that looks at the whole life of a homeless person, rather than just at selected episodes of rooflessness.

“No Home, No Place”: Addressing the Complexity of Homelessness in Old Age Through Community Dialogue

“…that cannot be resolved in isolation (Somerville, 2013). As mentioned earlier, a number of triggers have been identified as leading to homelessness in old age including poverty arising from low income, sudden unemployment, and lack of employment opportunities for older people (Crane et al, 2005).…”

Governing Homelessness: The Discursive and Institutional Construction of Homelessness in Australia

“…Literature shows that understandings of homelessness have undergone a broadly similar sequence of changes in conceptualization in Australia and other Western countries over the past half-century (Avramov 1999;Minnery and Greenhalgh 2007;Pleace, Burrows, and Quilgars 1997;Polakow and Guillean 2001;Somerville 2013). Following the "rediscovery" of poverty in the 1960s, there was a shift away from the earlier focus on individual characteristics and decisions of "skid row" homeless men, in particular moral issues of deservingness, and "homelessness" came to be viewed as a problem related to social and economic structural factors (Dickey 1980;Garton 1990;Jacobs, Kemeny, and Manzi 1999;Pleace and Quilgars 2003).…”

Transitions through homelessness: the impact of psychosocial factors on well-being and outcomes in a homeless sample

“…Defining the individual as 'homeless' reiterates their loss, disadvantage, and social exclusion and overshadows the strengths and resilience of people who are homeless. Clearly, this would be at odds with calls to take a strengths based approach to understanding the experience of homelessness (Biswas-Diener & Diener, 2006;Hodgetts, Stolte, & Groot, 2014;Johnstone et al, 2016;Somerville, 2013). Consequently, future life aspirations seems a natural variable to examine.…”

“…Labour market conditions (such as high rates of unemployment and underemployment) and household dissolutions are additional factors that are regularly identified as contributors to homelessness (Gould & Williams, 2010;Orwin, Scott, & Arieira, 2005;Philippot et al, 2007;Somerville, 2013). Institutionalisation is another contributing factor; with prospective studies reporting that homelessness occurs disproportionately after discharge from foster care, treatment facilities, and correctional facilities (Cutcher, Degenhardt, Alati, & Kinner, 2014;Dworsky, Napolitano, & Courtney, 2013;Metraux, Byrne, & Culhane, 2010).…”

“…Additionally, rather than seeing 'homeless people' as passive victims or homelessness as an all-encompassing identity (Parsell, 2012), taking a social identity approach allows us to investigate the range of identities that constitute how a person defines themselves. This may facilitate giving voice to the perspectives of people experiencing homelessness, a voice which has been argued to be missing in a large portion of homeless research and policy Somerville, 2013).…”