Public Opinion

As modern societies struggle to alleviate the problem of homelessness, the attitudes of the general public play an important role. Indeed, attitude shapes both behavior and opinion. For policymakers and service providers alike, knowing how someone is likely to behave toward a homeless person can be useful. And certainly, public attitudes inform public opinion on policy initiatives. Knowledge of public attitudes on issues of homelessness is a valuable source of information (because it predicts public opinion), useful in a range of activities from recruiting volunteers for an emergency shelter to passing new legislation to improve welfare benefits.

If coverage of homelessness in the popular media serves as a barometer of public opinion, it would appear that public interest in the subject waxes and wanes. Since the late 1980s, not only has such media coverage decreased, it also had expressed a more varied mix of views on the homeless, including many negative portrayals. According to some reports, during the 1990s the public began to suffer from “compassion fatigue” and lost interest in hearing about the homeless (Link et al. 1995, 533). While public policy does not necessarily parallel public opinion directly, a temporal link has been established in a number of studies. Change in public opinion does appear to lead to subsequent change in related public policy; indeed, factors such as offering new opinion data to politicians compounds this effect. Advocates promoting new initiatives to help the homeless can serve their cause if they show evidence of likely public support. Lacking other evidence, however, policymakers can be swayed by media accounts of “compassion fatigue” without questioning their accuracy (note that such accounts in the media continued to appear periodically during the late 1990s and early 2000s). Studies examining the true state of public opinion can thereby play a role in the advancement of new policy initiatives.