Homelessness, Health, and Human Needs (1988) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix B: The Methodology of Counting the Homeless
Appendix B: The Methodology of Counting the Homeless
Pages 169-182
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From page 169... ...
S Department of Housing and Urban Development has conducted its own research on the need for emergency shelters; the National Institute for Mental Health administers a number of service programs and has funded several research studies on the demand for services by the homeless; and P.L.'s 98-151 and 98-181 charged the Emergency Food and Shelter National Board with the quick distribution of $40 million to supplement and extend emergency food and shelter services nationwide.
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From page 170... ...
The necessity of reliance on the advice of key informants whose perceptions of the size and nature of the homeless population are biased by their own particular set of experiences and who may be unaware of the extent of the overlap in service utilization may also badly skew that population estimate. Two much-quoted national studies have reported widely divergent estimates of the national homeless population as determined by indirect estimation techniques.
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From page 171... ...
Obtaining estimates from people who have studied the homeless population for a whole city may be no better, since their methodologies and definitions vary. The city of Baltimore provides an example, where estimates of the number of homeless people there have ranged from 2,000 to 15,000 (Baltimore City Council, 1983; Health and Welfare Council of Central Maryland, 1983, 19861.
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From page 172... ...
They also employed expert informants to estimate the proportions of homeless people who may not ever come in contact with shelter providers and thus would not even be included in the unsheltered estimate. They developed adjustment factors based on these estimates, despite the fact that there was little unanimity as to the size of this hidden population.
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From page 173... ...
Additional data supplied by the shelter providers as well as by hospitals, police departments, and other informants supplemented the counts, to give more information on the composition of the homeless population. SINGLE-CONTACT CENSUSES The single-contact census is a technique that has been used in cities to make estimates of the size of their homeless populations.
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From page 174... ...
, it is out of date almost immediately after it is taken. Moreover, it may poorly represent the true homeless population if taken at the wrong time.
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From page 175... ...
admitted that even when the police officers who accompanied the interviewers were not immediately introduced, subjects were always able to identify them as police officers, and therefore, they started the interaction on a negative note. In addition, the teams conducted preliminary observations of the blocks before any formal screening started, thereby tipping off a naturally suspicious population to their presence.
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From page 176... ...
Demographic distributions observed at different times were used to draw conclusions about the changing nature of the homeless population in Nashville. The study concluded that although the estimated numbers of homeless people varied relatively little, from 689 to 836, the ratios of homeless found in shelters compared with the homeless found on the streets varied with the seasons.
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From page 177... ...
The values in Table B- 1 represent counts of people observed at different times: N represents the count of those obtained during the first data collection period, N2 represents the count of those obtained during the second data collection period, and M represents the number matched, that is, the number observed both times.
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From page 178... ...
There are two studies of homeless populations that make use of capturerecapture techniques. The first was a study of the number of homeless men in Sydney, Australia (Darcy and Jones, 19751.
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From page 179... ...
It was found that about three-quarters of those questioned were potential shelter users. Taking this into account, the capture-recapture estimates from this study provided estimates that were very compatible with those obtained by the indirect survey method in the Health and Welfare Council of Central Maryland (1986)
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From page 180... ...
DISCUSSION Although the existence of a sizable homeless population is beyond doubt and there is a consensus among knowledgeable people that the extent of the problem has been increasing in recent years, the everchanging and fluid nature of the homeless population presents great methodological challenges in obtaining an accurate measure of its size. A review of the methods for estimating the number of homeless people indicates that great caution should be exercised in interpreting any of the available data.
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From page 181... ...
Research teams must take advantage of the knowledge of people who are familiar with the homeless population in designing data collection techniques and in defining and identifying homeless people. Even with careful attention to methodological issues, it may not be practical or possible to develop a valid national estimate of the total number of homeless people.
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From page 182... ...
New York: New York State Department of Social Services. Robinson, F
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