This study conducted in-depth interviews with 11 homeless or formerly homeless individuals at eh Central City Lutheran Mission. The focus of this research project is mental health service utilization among the homeless in San Bernardino. A wide array of services are available to the mentally ill homeless in this area, however services offered often do not meet the needs of this population.

Objective: Although factors that promote initial and recurring homelessness among inner city women have been long explored, impoverished women continue enter and re-enter shelters at troubling rates. This trend is projected to increase over time. This longitudinal study uses Sydemics as a framework to advance our understanding of the relationship between depression, PTSD, trauma and intimate partner violence and the loss of housing among impoverished women using inner city Emergency Departments. We hypothesized that depression, PTSD, childhood trauma and IPV are positively associated with homelessness at baseline and that women with higher rates of a combination of these variables (e.g. PTSD and IPV) in wave 1 will have higher odds of experiencing both an initial and repeat bout of homelessness in the second and/or third waves, controlling for all other variables in the study. Method: Multivariate analyses and logistic regression, at baseline and longitudinally, were conducted to test study hypotheses with homelessness as the dependent variable. Six multivariate logistic regression models were used. Odds ratios (OR) with their 95% confidence intervals are reported. Results: Depression and childhood trauma were individually associated with homelessness at the .05 level in this sample of low income women. IPV was marginally related to homelessness (p=0.0917). PTSD however was not. Importantly, although IPV and PSTD were not individually associated with homelessness in bivariate analyses, housed, never homeless women, and women who had previously experienced homelessness had a greater odd of becoming homeless than those who experienced only one of these risk variables. Specifically, housed, never homeless women who had PTSD and IPV had a 2.2 odd of becoming homeless for the first time in waves 2 and 3, whereas those who experienced PTSD only had a 1.3 odds of becoming homeless for the first time; never homeless participants who experienced IPV only a 1.7 greater odds of becoming homeless (CI.0.348, 14.84; p=0.385), adjusting for all other variables. Similarly, the odd of becoming homeless again among participants who had PTSD and experienced IPV was 1.7 whereas the odds of recurrent homelessness was 1.2 among those who experienced PTSD only and 1.1 among those who experienced IPV only (CI.0.397, 7.46; p=0.463), controlling for all other variables in the study. Conclusion: Our findings confirm our hypotheses that low-income women who have PTSD, depression, histories of childhood trauma, and/or IPV have a higher odds of initial and recurrent homelessness when compared with women who do not have these risk variables. Our findings further confirm that women who have combinations of risk variables have even higher odds of future homelessness. Due to the low sample size of women with histories of homelessness in the study, there was lack of power. Despite this challenge, the results of these explorations (in determining heretofore unidentified effect sizes) utilizing Syndemics as a conceptual framework are promising. Future research with larger sample sizes (and sufficient power) are important to further the initial findings from this study.

Ho Chui-ming. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-223). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / List of Plates --- p.i / Abstract --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.v / Introduction The Quest for the Agency of Street Sleepers --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One --- Literature Review and Theoretical Framework --- p.9 / Chapter I. --- Reading Street Sleepers: To Review the Past Studies --- p.9 / Chapter II. --- Center and Margin: To Approach the Operation of Power --- p.24 / Chapter III. --- Domination and Resistance: To Bring the Human Agency Backin --- p.26 / Chapter IV. --- From Spatial Resistance to Spatial Formation --- p.31 / Chapter V. --- From Identity Formation to Unfixing the Body --- p.35 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Methodology and Contexutualization --- p.40 / Chapter I. --- A Qualitative Research on Street Life --- p.40 / Chapter II. --- Triangulated Methods: Ethnography and Non-Reactive Method --- p.41 / Chapter III. --- The Profile of the Subjects --- p.48 / Chapter IV. --- Contextualizing the Study and Locating the Researcher --- p.53 / Chapter V. --- The Context: Yaumatei --- p.55 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Persistence of Street Sleeping: Beyond Housed/ Non-housed --- p.69 / Chapter I. --- Home Ownership --- p.70 / Chapter II. --- Rental System in Private Market --- p.73 / Chapter III. --- Public Housing --- p.77 / Chapter IV. --- Shelter and Hostel for Street Sleepers --- p.80 / Chapter V. --- Rehabilitation Program for Substance Users --- p.84 / Chapter VI. --- Open Space --- p.86 / Chapter VII --- Concluding Remarks: Beyond Housed/Non-housed --- p.91 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Producing a Livable Space: A Space of Resistance --- p.95 / Chapter I. --- A Production of Space: The Spatial Arrangement --- p.95 / Chapter II. --- A Space of Resistance: The Spatio-social Relations --- p.111 / Chapter III. --- Concluding Remarks: Marginal Space and Livable Space --- p.135 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Narratives of Identity: Fixing and Unfixing the Body --- p.139 / Chapter I. --- The Construction of Social Identities --- p.139 / Chapter II. --- The Multiplicity of Self Narratives --- p.144 / Chapter III. --- Concluding Remarks: Negotiating Identities in Everyday Life --- p.159 / Chapter Chapter Six --- Conclusion --- p.163 / Epilogue --- p.173 / Appendix A The Profile of the Subjects --- p.176 / Appendix B The Alternative Map of Yaumatei --- p.189 / Appendix C The Benches and the Chairs in Yaumatei --- p.206 / Appendix D Glossary --- p.207 / Bibliography --- p.210

This thesis discusses the issues that are prioritized in policy documents, and the concerns which appear in newspaper stories, concerning housing issues in Calgary, Alberta. It holds that certain, ‘voices’ are accounted for and accommodated over other, more vulnerable, ‘voices’ in the policy arena. The ways in which these voices are constructed, and how particular agents, subjects, objects, and ‘truths’ are formed, all result from particular uses of language. The thesis maintains that those who have the most to gain from supportive housing policies are often excluded from the process of developing, or commenting on, policy altogether. It also suggests that their discursive construction as objects of policy, as moral examples, or as constituent elements of an “issue,” has implications both for actions undertaken in relation to them by governments and other agencies, and for their own ability to act effectively to articulate and to address their own concerns. / ix, 311 leaves ; 28 cm. --

The present study assessed the relationship between mentally ill homeless and their companion pets and questioned if the pets acted as a barrier for them to receive shelter and other services. The study also sought to find if pets acted as a communication tool between this population and society. themselves because they are mentally vulnerable and victims of a mental disorder.

The purpose of this project was to find out whether or not there were specific factors that made homeless people depressed. Finding depression factors will help to establish strategies and programs that would prevent homeless people from being depressed. The current study tested the hypothesis that basic needs and education are needed to help in factoring depression.

An overview is presented of anthropology's interest in voluntary association, from the classical influences and studies to sociological and anthropological work that illustrate recent trends from the last decade. Information is presented from the author's fieldwork with the Tucson Homeless Union and the Southern Arizona Coalition for the Homeless that describes the homeless situation in Tucson and the efforts of these groups, whose members share a dedication to improving conditions for socioeconomically marginal people through activist means of protest and civil disobedience. Marked by fluidity of membership and unique internal dynamics, these groups present a special case-study of voluntary associations as a means of urban adaptation through self-help and as a vehicle for social change. It is demonstrated how and examination of the values expressed by the existence and actions of these associations is useful in understanding the nature of society and the stability of the political system.

This study examined a segment of the homeless population who participated in a jobs training program. The research investigated the effect of socioeconomic status, self-esteem, and locus of control on the clients in getting and keeping jobs. The training was a comprehensive 36-day treatment dealing with three major areas: (a) how to get a job, (b) how to keep a job, and (c) how to develop life-coping skills. A quasi-experimental research design was used for testing by t-tests, two-by-two repeated-measured anova, chi-square tests, and regression analysis. The findings showed that high socioeconomic status clients demonstrated higher self-esteem and internal locus of control than low socioeconomic status clients at the start of the treatment. The treatment had a significant effect on both groups with an increase in self-esteem and internal locus of control and a decrease in both external locus of control dimensions of powerful others and chance. The treatment had a greater effect on the low socioeconomic status clients than on the high socioeconomic status clients on increases in self-esteem and locus of control—internal. Both groups were successful in finding jobs, with 79% for high socioeconomic status clients and 74% for low socioeconomic status clients having jobs at the end of the treatment. Both high self-esteem and high socioeconomic status had a positive effect on the length of time over a sixmonth period following treatment that clients were able to maintain employment (job retention). This study must be considered largely as exploratory in its findings. Restrictions in the selection process prevented the results from being generalized. It does, however, provide a very important profile of a segment of the homeless population that can be useful in the research for new and improved methods of dealing with the problems of the homeless unemployed.

This project examines the effects of the homeless body and the threat of homelessness on constructing a national imaginary that relies on the trope of locatability for recognition as a citizen-subject. The thesis argues that homelessness, the oft-figured specter of public space, functions as bodies that are “pushed out” as citizen-subjects due to their inability maintain both discursive and material location. I argue that figures of “home” rely on the ever-present threat of dislocation to maintain a privileged position as the location of the consuming citizen-subject. That is, the presence of the dislocated homeless body haunts the discursive and material construction of home and its inhabitants. Homeless then becomes the uncanny inverse of home, functioning as an abjection that reifies home “place” as an arbiter of recognition in a neoliberal national imaginary. The chapters proceed to examine what some consider homeless “homes,” focusing on the reduction of the homeless condition to a place of inhabitance, or the lack thereof. This attempt to locate the homeless body becomes a symptom of the desire for recognition as a placed body. The thesis ends on a note of political possibility, figuring the uncanny as a rupture that evacuates language of signification and opens up space for a form of recognition without an over-determined identity.

The aim of this study was to explore the Health Service Utilization (HSU) of homeless people in Dublin. In particular, it sought to identify a critical realist explanatory model for why the HSU of homeless people differs from that of the general population. Critical realist (CR) ethnography was used as the research methodology and was supplemented with forty-seven semi-structured interviews and two focus groups. The HSU of homeless participants in Dublin is described. When compared to the domiciled population, homeless people were found to have a tendency to present late on in their illness, to have higher utilization of primary care services and lower utilization of secondary care services and to avoid psychiatric services. The factors that influenced participants HSU tendency are identified as external or internal influences on HSU. External factors are described as physical, administrative or attitudinal barriers or deterrents; or external promoters of health service usage. Internalised inhibitors and promoters are illustrated as either cognitions or emotions that are developed in reaction to external circumstances and which either negatively or positively impact on health service usage. Interactions between health professionals and participants that resulted in exclusion (by the health professional or self-exclusion) are described as Conversations of Exclusion. A critical realist model was outlined that offers an explanation for why homeless people’s HSU differs from that of the general population in Dublin. This model included a description of the generative mechanisms identified as producing the HSU tendencies in the study population. The implications of this new model are discussed in the light of the literature and previous models that seek to explain the HSU of homeless people.