Ethnography

Private Lives/Public Spaces, the groundbreaking study that was published in 1981 and heralded the emergence of contemporary homelessness, was not one of the many quantitative surveys of homeless populations that began appearing in rapid succession during the mid-1980s. Rather, it was an ethnographic account—a rich, compelling, qualitative record of what two investigators, Ellen Baxter and Kim Hopper, had learned about homelessness and homeless people by spending three years observing and talking with them as they eked out their precarious existences. Baxter and Hopper's work was compelling because of the real, immediate sense it provided of who homeless people were, where they had come from, the very difficult circumstances they faced, and how they felt about and dealt with those circumstances. This was not a distilled set of percentages and numbers that somehow lost sight of the individuals behind them. This was the human drama itself, portrayed in a way that allowed one to grasp the world from a homeless person's perspective.

In turning to ethnography as a way of documenting the phenomenon of contemporary homelessness, Baxter and Hopper were actually drawing upon a long tradition of using intensive qualitative methods to understand homelessness. As far back as the early 1920s, for example, sociologists such as Nels Anderson were closely examining the world of the hobo as part of a newly emerging school of urban ethnographic research emanating out of the University of Chicago. Similarly, as part of the broad scholarly interest in skid rows and public inebriates that occurred toward the middle of the twentieth century, scholars such as Jacqueline Wiseman, a sociologist, and James Spradley, an anthropologist, used ethnographic methods to shed light on the subtle relationships between homeless alcoholics and the institutions meant to control and/or provide services to them.

This tradition continues today. Although a spate of largely quantitative studies followed Baxter and Hopper's qualitative wake-up call, additional ethnographic efforts soon began surfacing in at least a dozen cities across the United States. Some of these efforts—such as David Snow and Leon Anderson's work in Austin, Texas, Rob Rosenthal's work in Santa Barbara, California, Jackson Underwood's work in Los Angeles, and Gwendolyn Dordick's work in New York—zeroed in on the lives of homeless people in street and shelter settings, painting detailed portraits of how they meet their material and social needs. Other efforts, such as Elliot Liebow's sensitive portrayal of homeless women, focused on identifiable subpopulations among the broader homeless population. Still other efforts, exemplified by the work of researchers such as Michael Rowe and Rae Bridgman, explored the intersection between homeless people and the programs and service providers attempting to meet their needs. Together, these efforts have played a pivotal role in expanding our understanding of contemporary homelessness and contemporary homeless people.