IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jijerp/v18y2021i14p7328-d590912.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Ecology of Unsheltered Homelessness: Environmental and Social-Network Predictors of Well-Being among an Unsheltered Homeless Population

Author

Listed:
  • Mary-Catherine Anderson

    (Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA)

  • Ashley Hazel

    (Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA)

  • Jessica M. Perkins

    (Department of Human and Organizational Development, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203, USA)

  • Zack W. Almquist

    (Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA)

Abstract

People experiencing homelessness (PEH) face extreme weather exposure and limited social support. However, few studies have empirically assessed biophysical and social drivers of health outcomes among unsheltered PEH. Social network, health, and outdoor exposure data were collected from a convenience sample of unsheltered PEH ( n = 246) in Nashville, TN, from August 2018–June 2019. Using multivariate fixed-effects linear regression models, we examined associations between biophysical and social environments and self-reported general health and emotional well-being. We found that study participants reported the lowest general health scores during winter months—Nashville’s coldest season. We also found a positive association between the number of nights participants spent indoors during the previous week and general health. Participants who spent even one night indoors during the past week had 1.8-point higher general health scores than participants who spent zero nights indoors ( p < 0.01). Additionally, participants who experienced a conflict with a social contact in the past 30 days had lower emotional well-being scores than participants who experienced no conflict. Finally, women had worse general health and emotional well-being than men. Ecologically framed research about health and well-being among PEH is critically needed, especially as climate change threatens to increase the danger of many homeless environments.

Suggested Citation

  • Mary-Catherine Anderson & Ashley Hazel & Jessica M. Perkins & Zack W. Almquist, 2021. "The Ecology of Unsheltered Homelessness: Environmental and Social-Network Predictors of Well-Being among an Unsheltered Homeless Population," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(14), pages 1-22, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:14:p:7328-:d:590912
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/14/7328/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/14/7328/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. North, C.S. & Eyrich, K.M. & Pollio, D.E. & Spitznagel, E.L., 2004. "Are Rates of Psychiatric Disorders in the Homeless Population Changing?," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 94(1), pages 103-108.
    2. Mariya Bezgrebelna & Kwame McKenzie & Samantha Wells & Arun Ravindran & Michael Kral & Julia Christensen & Vicky Stergiopoulos & Stephen Gaetz & Sean A. Kidd, 2021. "Climate Change, Weather, Housing Precarity, and Homelessness: A Systematic Review of Reviews," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(11), pages 1-16, May.
    3. A James O’Malley & Samuel Arbesman & Darby Miller Steiger & James H Fowler & Nicholas A Christakis, 2012. "Egocentric Social Network Structure, Health, and Pro-Social Behaviors in a National Panel Study of Americans," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(5), pages 1-9, May.
    4. Green, Harold D. & Tucker, Joan S. & Golinelli, Daniela & Wenzel, Suzanne L., 2013. "Social networks, time homeless, and social support: A study of men on Skid Row," Network Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(3), pages 305-320, December.
    5. Jessica H. Leibler & Daniel D. Nguyen & Casey León & Jessie M. Gaeta & Debora Perez, 2017. "Personal Hygiene Practices among Urban Homeless Persons in Boston, MA," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 14(8), pages 1-9, August.
    6. Ha, Yoonsook & Narendorf, Sarah C. & Santa Maria, Diane & Bezette-Flores, Noel, 2015. "Barriers and facilitators to shelter utilization among homeless young adults," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 25-33.
    7. Rosana Aguilera & Thomas Corringham & Alexander Gershunov & Tarik Benmarhnia, 2021. "Wildfire smoke impacts respiratory health more than fine particles from other sources: observational evidence from Southern California," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 12(1), pages 1-8, December.
    8. Coolhart, Deborah & Brown, Maria T., 2017. "The need for safe spaces: Exploring the experiences of homeless LGBTQ youth in shelters," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 230-238.
    9. Marcel Salathé & James H Jones, 2010. "Dynamics and Control of Diseases in Networks with Community Structure," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(4), pages 1-11, April.
    10. Barrett A. Lee & Marybeth Shinn & Dennis P. Culhane, 2021. "Homelessness as a Moving Target," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 693(1), pages 8-26, January.
    11. Zack W Almquist, 2020. "Large-scale spatial network models: An application to modeling information diffusion through the homeless population of San Francisco," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 47(3), pages 523-540, March.
    12. Perkins, Jessica M. & Subramanian, S.V. & Christakis, Nicholas A., 2015. "Social networks and health: A systematic review of sociocentric network studies in low- and middle-income countries," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 60-78.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Courtney Cronley & Amanda Fackler & Jennifer M. First & Sangwon Lee & Iris Tsouris, 2024. "Persons Experiencing Homelessness during Extreme Temperatures: Lessons for Promoting Socially Inclusive Adaptive Capacity," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 21(8), pages 1-16, July.
    2. Anthonj, C. & Stanglow, S.N. & Grunwald, N., 2024. "Co-defining WASH (In)Security challenges among people experiencing homelessness. A qualitative study on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation from Bonn, Germany," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 342(C).
    3. Midhat Z. Jafry & Jayda Martinez & Tzuan A. Chen & Michael S. Businelle & Darla E. Kendzor & Lorraine R. Reitzel, 2021. "Perceived Social Support Attenuates the Association between Stress and Health-Related Quality of Life among Adults Experiencing Homelessness," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(20), pages 1-14, October.
    4. Derrien, Monika M. & Bratman, Gregory N. & Cerveny, Lee K. & Levy, Chaja & Blahna, Dale J. & Frank, Paulo & Serio, Naomi, 2024. "Public nature and health for homeless populations: Professionals’ perceptions of contingent human benefits and harms," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 347(C).
    5. Renato M. Liboro & Sherry Bell & Jason Flatt & Jennifer Pharr & Brandon Ranuschio & Lianne Barnes & Andrea Navarro & Alexander Ribeiro & Nadia Sheik-Yosef & John M. Waldron, 2024. "Lifetime Experiences of Housing Insecurity among Gay Men Living with HIV at Midlife: An Exploratory Study Utilizing a Social Determinants of Health Perspective," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-20, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gregory, Steve, 2012. "Ordered community structure in networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(8), pages 2752-2763.
    2. Wei Zhong, 2017. "Simulating influenza pandemic dynamics with public risk communication and individual responsive behavior," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 23(4), pages 475-495, December.
    3. Björkegren, Daniel & Karaca, Burak Ceyhun, 2022. "Network adoption subsidies: A digital evaluation of a rural mobile phone program in Rwanda," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    4. Chen, Dandan & Zheng, Muhua & Zhao, Ming & Zhang, Yu, 2018. "A dynamic vaccination strategy to suppress the recurrent epidemic outbreaks," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 108-114.
    5. Xie, Xiaoxiao & Huo, Liang'an, 2024. "Co-evolution dynamics between information and epidemic with asymmetric activity levels and community structure in time-varying multiplex networks," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 181(C).
    6. Bowen Yan & Steve Gregory, 2013. "Identifying Communities and Key Vertices by Reconstructing Networks from Samples," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(4), pages 1-14, April.
    7. María Laura Alzúa & Habiba Djebbari & Amy J. Pickering, 2020. "A Community-Based Program Promotes Sanitation," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 68(2), pages 357-390.
    8. Zhou, Bin & Yan, Xiao-Yong & Xu, Xiao-Ke & Xu, Xiao-Ting & Wang, Nianxin, 2018. "Evolutionary of online social networks driven by pareto wealth distribution and bidirectional preferential attachment," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 507(C), pages 427-434.
    9. Yoonsook, Ha & Thomas, Margaret M.C. & Narendorf, Sarah Carter & Maria, Diane Santa, 2018. "Correlates of shelter use among young adults experiencing homelessness," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 477-484.
    10. Kate Frazer & Thilo Kroll, 2022. "Understanding and Tackling the Complex Challenges of Homelessness and Health," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(6), pages 1-3, March.
    11. Eugenio Valdano & Chiara Poletto & Armando Giovannini & Diana Palma & Lara Savini & Vittoria Colizza, 2015. "Predicting Epidemic Risk from Past Temporal Contact Data," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(3), pages 1-19, March.
    12. Saxena, Chandni & Doja, M.N. & Ahmad, Tanvir, 2018. "Group based centrality for immunization of complex networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 508(C), pages 35-47.
    13. Haenssgen, Marco J. & Charoenboon, Nutcha & Zanello, Giacomo, 2021. "You’ve got a friend in me: How social networks and mobile phones facilitate healthcare access among marginalised groups in rural Thailand and Lao PDR," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    14. Jacqueline Kauff & Jonathan Brown & Norma Altshuler & Noelle Denny-Brown & Emily Sama Martin, "undated". "Findings from a Study of the SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access and Recovery (SOAR) Initiative," Mathematica Policy Research Reports 52d74a2c7c5947e58ddad7022, Mathematica Policy Research.
    15. Stephen J Gilmore, 2011. "Control Strategies for Endemic Childhood Scabies," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(1), pages 1-14, January.
    16. Kotnis, Bhushan & Kuri, Joy, 2016. "Cost effective campaigning in social networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 450(C), pages 670-681.
    17. Sania Ashraf & Cristina Bicchieri & Upasak Das & Tanu Gupta & Alex Shpenev, 2024. "Learning from diversity: ``jati" fractionalization, social expectations and improved sanitation practices in India," Discussion Papers 24-01, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi.
    18. Kathrin Büttner & Joachim Krieter & Arne Traulsen & Imke Traulsen, 2013. "Efficient Interruption of Infection Chains by Targeted Removal of Central Holdings in an Animal Trade Network," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(9), pages 1-12, September.
    19. Simon K. C. Cheung & Tommy K. Y. Cheung, 2022. "Mixed membership nearest neighbor model with feature difference," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(8), pages 1578-1594, December.
    20. Takagi, Daisuke & Yokouchi, Nobutada & Hashimoto, Hideki, 2020. "Smoking behavior prevalence in one's personal social network and peer's popularity: A population-based study of middle-aged adults in Japan," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 260(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:14:p:7328-:d:590912. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.