The paths to homelessness are complex and attributable to a combination of structural issues associated with poverty that can magnify personal vulnerabilities. However, as homelessness became more prominent in news media during the 1980s, media discourse increasingly focused on personal characteristics within the homeless population which cast people as personally responsible for their plight. Simultaneously, media explanations for homelessness that called attention to structural conditions that contribute to homelessness decreased during the decade. Scholars explain this shift by situating it within the social and political climate of the time. This study extends the line of research on homelessness in news media in order to understand how coverage of homelessness has changed between the 1980s and the 2010s. A quantitative content analysis examines newspaper articles in two cities in the western United States -- Portland, Oregon, and San Diego, California -- where homelessness is a prominent and enduring social and political issue. News articles are examined for changes between two time periods (1988-1990 and 2014-2016) in mentions of personal and structural factors as well as changes in the discussion of solutions for homelessness. Results show an increase over time in portrayals of structural factors that contribute to homelessness as well as an increase in talk about permanent housing solutions. However, mentions of personal problems and behaviors, such as mental illness and substance abuse, have also increased. This suggests that, while news discourse may be moving toward more nuanced portrayals that acknowledge societal factors, news media still tend to focus on characteristics of homelessness that can cast people as personally culpable.

For the last two decades displaced homeless people living in public places have doted the American landscape, despite increasing national wealth. Two factors which may contribute to this phenomenon are: 1) how the issue of homelessness is perceived through media coverage, and 2) what attributions of causality and responsibility are extricated from the vast multitude of media messages. An integration of theoretical frameworks within social-psychology (attribution and priming theory) and communication (agenda setting and framing effects) was consummated in a hypothesized mediated inference process: conceptualized as a cognitive continuum where the issue of homelessness first enters the cognition of the social observer (inaugural prime); is then given salience by the frequency of media coverage (agenda setting); thereupon shaped by media portrayals (framed); and attributions of causality and responsibility are formed. To examine the proposed mediated inference process a survey questionaire (n=283) was administered to college students revealing a significant correlation between the importance placed on the issue of homelessness (agenda setting) and resultant attributions of causality. As respondents' perceptions of the importance of homelessness increased, their societal attributions of causality increased. Conversely, as perceptions of importance decreased personal, internal attributions of causality increased. Additionally, high television use was found, through regression analysis, to be a significant predictor of situational attributions of causality. An experiment (n=96) was also administered to examine how different newspaper and television framing conditions effect attributions of causality. The results indicate that newspaper portrayals presented as isolated events lead subjects to attribute causality to personal dispositions; whereas portrayals presented as overall accounts lead subjects to societal attributions. Although the evidence for a mediated inference process was inconclusive, the results suggest that the frequency and framing of media coverage significantly affect the process of attributing causality for social issues such as homelessness.