Losing and Finding a Home

What we do

In the ‘Losing and Finding a Home’ research project we aim to explore the subjective experiences of the life courses of homeless individuals. We want to look at how those individuals discuss, in their own words, the important events in their lives and how they make sense of them. Part of our rationale for adopting this method is to put aside the label ‘homeless’ in ‘homeless people’ and view homelessness as one of the many chapters, events and circumstances in their life course.

There are two parts to our fieldwork research. Firstly, we have a series of stakeholder interviews and secondly, we have a substantial quantity of interviews with people who may be either homeless or at risk of homelessness. Around 20+ stakeholder interviews are included in our project and are of a semi-structured interview format. We will also include 100+ interviews with homeless people and these are in a ‘narrative’ interview format.

The narrative, or life story interviews, as we more often refer to them are quite an unusual way of conducting research. This is because we do not necessarily have a standardised format of conducting the interview. The lack of an interview structure is very deliberate and instead of asking the interviewees questions for them to answer, instead we ask them to tell us about events, experiences etc. This is because we are not just interested in what has happened in their lives, but also how they interpret it. We believe that conducting interviews in this way will enable us to find out much more about people and their experiences not just because this is a more ‘natural’ way of talking (people have used storytelling as a way of exchanging information for a long time before we could read or write) but also because we can examine how people may construct themselves, other people, places, circumstances and events through their talk. It can give us some insight into how they experience the world.

Of course, it is not possible to find out a persons entire life story and we do not aim to do this. We find that about one hour is the usual length of time that people can talk comfortably and willingly. Therefore, we encourage the interviewee to select the parts of their lives which have the most relevance to them and to be the director as well as the teller of their story.

Homelessness is a complex and individualised experience. While we interview people who are staying in hostel accommodation we are aware that there are also people who are homeless but have little or no contact with service providers at all. It is a goal of the research team to achieve as broad a perspective as possible by including people who use a range of services as well as those who, for one reason or another, may be excluded from using the services which are there to help them.  

We anticipate that there will be a number of outputs from the research, one of which will be this blog as a document of the project. As the research team has a mix of social policy and psychology expertise we aim to produce outputs which will have relevance for both. We wish to produce findings that will be useful for policy and practice for those whose goal it is to address the problems of homelessness, as well as offer something that will enlighten us further on the psychological experience of homelessness and the life histories of people who are in this situation.