Researching homelessness: implications for policy and practice

This chapter focuses on some of the recent developments and advances in researching those experiencing homelessness. Over the past 20 years or so, our understanding of the characteristics of those experiencing homelessness and solutions to homelessness has been shaped by increasingly sophisticated methodological approaches and designs. In particular, qualitative and ethnographic work that has provided valuable contextualisation and the use of longitudinal qualitative, administrative and survey data, in addition to randomised control trials, has been used to more fully understand entries to and exits from homelessness. However, despite these significant methodological advances and innovations, two methodological issues continue to distorting our understating of homelessness, they are the ongoing use cross-sectional research methods despite the long-standing identification of the limitations of this approach for understanding homelessness, and poor sampling frames which can distort longitudinal and ethnographic accounts of homelessness as well as cross-sectional research. If public policies responses to homelessness are to be evidence based, the robustness and appropriateness of the methodologies underpinning the evidence is crucial, and flawed methodologies are likely to generate flawed data, which may translate into flawed policies.