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Explaining adult homelessness in the US by stratification or situation
Author(s) -
Sosin Michael R.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of community and applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.042
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1099-1298
pISSN - 1052-9284
DOI - 10.1002/casp.716
Subject(s) - resource (disambiguation) , psychology , probabilistic logic , sociology , social psychology , positive economics , economics , epistemology , computer network , computer science , philosophy
In the US, the most widely accepted individual‐level explanations of homelessness suggest that adults lose their dwellings when they cannot compete in the marketplace for the monetary resources needed to pay for housing, and cannot compete in a non‐market struggle for compensatory resources. Such resource problems allegedly typically reflect myriad lifetime and current personal problems or deficits. However, the causal role of the problems and deficits is now known to be complex, and evidence about transitions in and out of homelessness suggests that key events occur somewhat independently of easily measured individual problems or deficits. This article, therefore, provides an alternative explanatory approach that directly focuses on aspects of the probabilistic situations that spur, or fail to reverse homelessness. The events and resource issues are posited to give rise to episodes of homelessness that vary in length, that are indirectly affected by many commonly mentioned individual traits, and that can be matched to targeted policies. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.