• Members of the public are perhaps unlikey to understand how outreach teams operate
• Frequent sight of large numbers of rough sleepers may mean someone is less likely to report it (in large cities, for instance)
• Fear of rough sleepers (personal safety issues)
• Belief that reporting person would have to approach rough sleeper
• Belief that the rough sleeper would have to appear to be distressed
• Not knowing that there are rough sleeper helplines!
• General apathy toward rough sleepers and the perception that other members of the public feel apathetic, too
• Wariness of outreach teams’ intentions (eg. news reports about doorways being hosed down to prevent rough sleepers returning - a ‘clean up the streets’ agenda)

I would welcome any more comments and suggestions. Please add to the box below and I’ll tag on to the list.

Thanks to @a6ruled  @ana_au_ @hankarbutty and @SHUSU_research for help with this! 

By the way, rough sleeper helpline numbers can be found here.

For more info about No Second Night Out, visit here. Evaluation of NSNO, including the rough sleeper helpline service, can be found here.

Photograph by Ciara Leeming

This one is a full page from the story of Becka where we learn about her self-harming brought on by her family stresses at home, her despondency at school, and the arrival of social workers in family life:

This second image shows two standalone images from two different stories. These two images represent what we refer to as the turning points in their lives. The top one is from Billy’s story. His life was almost taken from him in an explosion when he was on tour with the army in Iraq. Unfortunately, many of his colleagues and friends were not as lucky as he was. The image below that one is from Scott’s harrowing story. The image represents an incident of sexual abuse in childhood which led to his exclusion from his family, periods of rough sleeping, and many other challenging episodes of his life…..

These images and the works of several other talented artists are on display at the Homeless Film Festival Exhibition at the Kings Arms, Salford until the end of April. I hope you get the chance to see them.

The event will discuss the opportunities for businesses in Stoke-on-Trent to get involved in creating opportunity for homeless people. On the back our research examining the complex life histories of people experiencing homelessness, service providers in Stoke wish to establish new partnerships with businesses that have ambitions for a socially just and inclusive city.

The event will be chaired by Sara Williams from the North Staffs Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Also speaking will be Gill Brown (Chief Exec of Brighter Futures), Dr Phil Brown (University of Salford), and Tony Oakman (Stoke-on-Trent City Council).

We anticipate the event to be of interest to representatives from local businesses with new or existing commitments to policies of corporate social responsibility.

The City of Stoke-on-Trent is nationally recognised for its exemplary work in reducing the numbers of people sleeping on the streets and its commitment to eradicating homelessness. New research undertaken in the city reveals the complex and challenging life experiences that many homeless people have endured before they even lost their homes. Yet, those same individuals desire a better future for themselves and an opportunity to contribute productively to the city they live in. Local services encourage the development of skills and self-esteem, but can only succeed if there are opportunities to put this into practice. They can offer a range of ways to work with them which will be discussed on the evening.

The event will be held on  Friday 25^th May 2012 at the Mitchell Arts Centre, Broad Street, Hanley, ST1 4HG.

• 17:30 Wine reception
• 18:00 Presentations, Q+A, Networking
• 20:00 Close

If you would like to attend the event please contact Margeurite Castille at Brighter Futures on 01782 406000 or at Marguerite.Castille@brighter-futures.org.uk

If you have any questions about the event itself, please contact Gareth Morris on 0161 295 6926 or on g.j.morris@salford.ac.uk  

We were introduced, via a colleague in the University’s Art School, to Sam Dahl. At the time, Sam was completing his postgraduate studies at the University and has been working hard at providing the artwork for the book ever since. We’ve taken five diverse stories to provide the content for the graphic novel and each depicts a different pathway that precedes an episode of homelessness. The working title of the book is ‘Somewhere Nowhere’ and refers to the displacement that people often described in their life story: they knew where they were in time and space but were unclear of their place in their life journey.

We’re pleased to share a small sample of the images from the book here. Though these are all based on the real life stories of our participants, note that the names used here are anonymised and care has been taken to remove clearly identifiable information. 

The following images are taken from Scott’s story. He described experiencing a happy, normal childhood which was destroyed by an incident of sexual abuse. For Scott, this was a turning point in his life which led to many other factors often associated with the term ‘complex lives’: family rejection, rough sleeping, substance misuse, and poor physical health.

The graphic novel is scheduled for completion at the end of May where it will be available for people to take away and read at our research dissemination event in Stoke. In a future post, I will publish some more details about the book’s distribution. We’d like it to be read as far and wide as possible. We hope the book will be easy for anybody to pick up and read regardless of their knowledge of homelessness. We also hope it will enable new audiences to learn more about the complexity of people’s lives and the problems they may be addressing before and during their episodes of homelessness.

If you have any feedback, questions, or comments about Somewhere Nowhere, please leave them in the box below. We’d be really interested to hear what people have to say about it.

To learn more about Sam and his work, please check out this link and follow him on Twitter.

We can contribute more to this discussion because the life story approach we took to our research enables us to look further into the past of an individual’s life and establish the roles of different friendships over time.

While we accept that individuals life stories are all different, there were some commonalities among many of the young people in terms of how they viewed these friendships. In very basic terms, many of them made friends with the ‘wrong crowd’ during their high school years and frequently used drink and drugs and engaged in some low-level crime etc. (see quotes for these in the slides). In their post-school years, they often disengaged with these networks when they realised they wanted something more or different in their lives.

The third part of their life story where they discussed friendships was when they were in the hostel. This was often perceived as a time of renewal for many of our interviewees (more quotes in the slides). It is here where we begin to question the strength of the hypothesis above, that: “the longer young people are homeless, the more they adapt to homelessness as a way of life”. We should be very careful as researchers in making such claims: because of the experiences that people have reported to us in this research, I am doubtful of the claim this hypothesis makes and believe it to be potentially dangerous in undermining the role of hostel accommodation and the potential for friendships made there.

I will continue to work on this analysis and welcome any feedback from others…

• Do you think that people adapt to homelessness?
• Do you think that other people have a role in sustaining a person’s homelessness, or helping people out of it, or perhaps both?

This is the abstract for my presentation:

The response to homelessness in the UK has moved away from focusing specifically on housing policy to a recognition of the complex needs of those experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness. A key characteristic has been an emphasis on multi-agency working at a local level. This paper reports on findings emerging from a two-year study into homelessness in a UK city. The project as whole explored the life histories of people experiencing homelessness as well as focusing on the context in which homelessness services were delivered in the city. To this end, a number of people working in the ‘homeless industry’ were interviewed about the issues impacting upon their work. Based upon these interviews, this paper focuses on the response of service providers towards homelessness, exploring the mobilisation of multi-agency working, and examining how service providing professionals talk about the people they work with and alongside. It highlights an increasing ‘professionalization’ of key services, a hierarchy of organizations and a conflict between cooperation and competition in multi-agency working. Overall, it illustrates that competition between services, coupled with the ‘financial crisis’, has created an environment where organizations more often work with those individuals deemed most likely to ‘succeed’. Consequently, supporting individuals with the most complex needs remained a key issue for service providers.

We would welcome comments on any of the issues raised above…

I remember meeting one man who slept in a leaky shed. He was well known to services and few were willing to engage with him. However, the RST tried really hard to engage him in appropriate services and negotiated with both the service and providers and the individual concerned to try and help him. But, for one reason or another, he simply refused to go for it. It’s frustrating for everyone involved, in think for no other reason than they just don’t understand it. I couldn’t understand it. Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that incident in this blog post, but just use it as a starting point from which to generate further discussion. So:

• Why do people sleep rough in winter?
• How can we help people who sleep rough in winter, especially if they refuse it ?

The Universities of Salford and Lincoln have conducted research into multiple exclusion homelessness over the previous two years (as one of the four research teams in the ESRC/JRF funded programme). Instead of a statistical study, we were more interested in the insights that can be yielded from a qualitative study: we did this by conducting life story interviews with people who were homeless. This method has allowed us to identify and analyse the complex, intertwined events of an individual’s life. Many of our participants experienced some sort of physical or health problem; alcohol and substance misuse was also prevalent.

One interesting finding was the role of dyslexia in the life stories of people who had become homeless. Trent, a seventeen year old interviewee, discussed how dyslexia was caught up in his journey through education. Trent had vivid memories of being neglected by his alcoholic parents at the age of ten – the same age he developed a habit for alcohol himself.  He discussed how these problems combined to lead to his early exit from high school:

Int          When did you find out you had dyslexia then?  

Trent         It was when I was in Year 7, when I went high school. They thought I had something wrong with me, but they thought it was because of my behaviour, ‘cos I wasn’t at school or anything.

Trent          When you were at primary school?         

Rsp         Hmm, they thought it was ‘cos I was a young lad, growing up, being naughty, but when I got to high school they found out I’d got dyslexia and it’s just, like I had to strive for my exams like, but I never got to do them in my own level. I got kicked out in the last year.

After leaving school early, Trent began to sell drugs and joined a gang. He also carried a gun to keep himself safe. Later, he realised that his friends were ‘using’ him (and giving him somewhere to sleep) only because he was giving them drugs. He identified a turning point in his life as the time he left them to move in to a hostel; once there, he received support to seek employment and independent accommodation.

In contrast to Trent, Scott was a forty-one year old interviewee (and just six years younger than the average life expectancy age identified in the Crisis report) who had experienced health problems throughout his life story. Scott was sexually assaulted by his father at the age of five. Because his father was arrested, Scott was ostracised by his family and, at the same time, he turned to smoking cigarettes, and eventually alcohol and drugs, too. He started smoking cannabis at age twelve, cocaine at twenty-one, and heroin at twenty-six. He described himself as a ‘right swine’ as a child. At the age of eleven he was involved in an accident which resulted in colitis and a pierced liver, lung, and kidney. He was away from school for a year and felt apathetic about education when he returned. He was placed in care but left at age fifteen when he moved to London. He slept rough for two years, and at age sixteen, he was raped.  Scott then spent around fifteen years employed by Gypsies with whom he would travel internationally. When this ended, he struggled to work again and returned to rough sleeping and substance misuse. At forty he had a heart attack which prompted him to stop using drugs and cut down on alcohol.

What is interesting about these stories is that it allows us to think about the bigger picture of an individual’s life: it adds some meaning and depth to the statistics we read in research projects about homelessness. We can see from these examples that problems with health are not necessarily a result of homelessness, nor have they become homeless because of their health problems. It just isn’t that simple. Trent’s issue with dyslexia was not picked up on early in school; indeed, his behavior was attributed to be that of a ‘naughty boy’. Scott clearly had problems with his health from the unfortunate accident he experienced as a child. His pathway to alcohol and drugs is, according to Scott, his method of coping with the abuse he suffered as a child. Though he first used them when he was a child, he began to use harder drugs after he became homeless. The heart attack he experienced as a forty year old is attributed to his years of drug and alcohol use.

There are also two contrasting narratives in these examples, too. For Trent, he had a problem (dyslexia) which was combined with several others (parental neglect, being surrounded by other drug users) that would eventually lead him toward homelessness. Homelessness, one would hope, is the turning point for him to move forward and progress with his life. Scott, on the other hand, has experienced some kind of physical and mental distress for almost his entire life and for which his experience of homelessness has contributed.

The Crisis/University of Sheffield report has highlighted the problems associated with poor life expectancy and health outcomes. To understand the role of alcohol and substance misuse, as well as problems with physical and mental health, an individualised analysis such as the life story approach has been useful in acquiring insight; it can also help us to identify where, who, and how in a person’s life course particular problems can be picked up on and addressed before they lead to homelessness. We hope this blog post helps to provoke further thought and discussion.

As you may or not be aware, our research project has been part of a wider programme of research in the multiple exclusion homelessness programme. The findings from the programme were launched at an event in London in September, which was chaired by Jon Snow, the Channel Four journalist, and attracted significant nationwide media attention. A JRF round-up document was also produced to coincide with this event and this can be accessed here. The round-up was received well across a wide audience and received support from many stakeholders in the field, including the Minister for Housing, Grant Shapps. It is also encouraging to see outputs from the wider research programme regularly being shared and disseminated via Twitter.

Yet, it feels as though there is so much more work that we can do. We have a number of academic papers which we are working on, but we also recognise that we have more to contribute and in ways we did not foresee when we began our research. Working with partner organisations in Stoke has helped us to share knowledge, understand what the goals are, and find ways of supporting each other to achieve what we all want: better outcomes for homeless people in the city. As an example, we recognise, as a group (the voluntary sector, local authority, and the research team), that more can be done with other public service bodies, and the private sector, to develop opportunities for homeless people to move forwards. We are finding ways to increase their awareness, demystify misconceptions around homelessness, and consider the role different services and employers may play in the life stories of individuals and the ‘ecosystem’ of the city.

We also want to improve the network of homelessness researchers in the country. At the moment, researchers appear disconnected from each other. This is partly because homelessness is an area of concern across disciplines, such as housing, social policy, and to a lesser degree, psychology. A mixture of disciplines is a welcome asset to the study of homelessness, but it will benefit from improved links between individual researchers and institutions. Finding ways of bringing them together and sharing knowledge will help to inform future directions of study and lead to better understandings of homelessness, new practices, and provide evidence for policymakers.

Finally, we’re looking to do more with the findings of our own research project. The life experiences of the people interviewed are fascinating. Listening to the stories, and reading them, inspires a tremendous mix of emotions: sadness, despair, anger, happiness, laughter, surprise, hope, fear, awe, and wonder - all the emotional responses you would expect to experience in hearing human stories. These are the things that remind us that, among the professional jargon, we are dealing with real human experience; we are reminded of why homelessness is such a serious social issue. But, there are limits to our abilities as a research team and for our work to have an impact on others, we are currently working with talented, creative individuals to help us re-tell these stories. We’re also looking for funding opportunities to do more creative work and engage larger, more diverse audiences and, at the same time, draw upon the talents of homeless people themselves. To exemplify this point, I’ll finish the post with a short film which was created by young people with experience of homelessness. Volunteers at the YMCA in Stoke produced this film with the support of regional television, and it was aired on local news about a year ago:

The turn to a social and cultural understanding of homelessness is a relatively recent development in the literature on homelessness. Previously, many ideas about homelessness have made assumptions about why it happens (usually the responsibility is assumed to lie either with the individual themselves or, alternatively, is the fault of ‘society’). A further assumption is that if we know what makes people homeless, then we can know how to ‘cure’ it. But recent authors of homelessness have looked at it from a different perspective: they have taken a deeper interest in the wider experiences of homeless people and by doing so have gained a richer understanding. This isn’t just about what homelessness is, or necessarily how it ought to be fixed; it is about understanding the meaning of experience to those individuals and how they see themselves within the social world (among their friends, family, peers, support workers, etc.).

The application of psychology, as we are discovering, has much to offer in our understanding of homelessness. It can also help to support practitioners with the services they offer. The ‘Psychologically Informed Environment’ Approach (PIE) is highlighted in the  Mental Health Good Practice Guide and points out:

“User-led services that work to encourage engagement but not reproduce dependency will be more effective than those that overlook the social dimension of person-centred services.” (p. 19)

It is an approach being taken up by St Mungo’s.

The PIE approach is one example of what could potentially be a wider offering of psychological knowledge to the area. We would be really interested to hear your views about the role of psychology for homelessness. Whether you have been, or are homeless, whether you work with homeless people or are involved in policymaking, please share your views. We would also like to hear from any other psychologists, academics or in practice, who may be working in the area of homelessness or a related field.

Feel free to leave a comment here or contact one of us via email. Our researchers are listed here.