Research on Homelessness: Overview

Surveys of Homeless People

Perhaps the most common approach to understanding homelessness involves interviewing currently homeless people. In what may have been the nation's first large-scale, systematic study of homelessness, Alice Solenberger profiled 1,000 homeless men who sought help from the city of Chicago from 1900 to 1903. Solenberger classified the respondents in her resulting book, with chapters on “homeless old men,” “chronic beggars,” “confirmed wanderers or ‘tramps’,” and “homeless, vagrant and runaway boys.” She also described their disabilities or deficits, with chapters on “the crippled and maimed” and “the insane, feeble-minded, and epileptic.” The twin foci on classification and deficits, especially mental illness and substance abuse, have dominated many more recent studies as well.

The most comprehensive and sophisticated recent study of the characteristics of homeless individuals is the Urban Institute's (1999) national survey of homeless assistance providers and clients. The researchers interviewed over 4,000 randomly selected clients of sixteen types of homeless assistance programs in seventy-six urban and rural areas representative of the United States. Their report describes the characteristics of homeless families and single homeless individuals; their patterns of homelessness; their possible problems such as hunger, poverty, mental and physical health problems, substance abuse, adverse childhood experiences, and victimization; and the amounts and sources of their income.

The differences between these studies, nearly a century apart, reflect both a change in the nature of homelessness—female adolescents, women, and families with children have joined men and male adolescents among those seeking shelter—and advances in sampling methods. However, all such surveys are subject to some of the same limitations.

[Page 476]First, characteristics of homeless people vary depending on how homelessness is defined. Most researchers in the United States currently count as “homeless” those who sleep in shelters, public places, or places not usually considered suitable for human habitation, such as cars or abandoned buildings. People who double up with others because they have no place to go, or people in institutions with no dwelling to return to are usually classified as “precariously housed.” Adolescents are sometimes counted as homeless if they are away from home overnight without permission, even if they are in conventional housing with friends.

Second, their characteristics vary depending on how homeless people are selected for interview. For example, many surveys of homeless people exclude adolescents by design. Surveys of people who seek services—like Solenberger's or the Urban Institute's—exclude an unknown number who do not (although the bias is smaller when more types of programs are included). This restriction may affect the findings on characteristics. For example, if women with children are more likely to seek shelter than homeless men, they may be overrepresented in shelter samples. Or if women fleeing domestic violence go to safe houses run by an agency that does not also run homeless shelters, they may be missed. The characteristics of service systems can also affect clients or distort researchers' findings. For example, if housing programs exclude people who use alcohol or drugs, some substance users may decline to come indoors. Others may understate their substance use, even when promised confidentiality by an independent researcher. If shelters for families exclude men, as is often the case, families may appear to be headed by single women when they are not, or were not before they sought shelter. Nonetheless, careful random samples such as the Urban Institute's provide a far more representative picture of homelessness than haphazard or specialized samples, such as those of homeless people admitted to psychiatric emergency rooms.

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