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Absence of a Family Safety Net for Homeless Families

NCJ Number
141205
Journal
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Volume: 19 Issue: 4 Dated: special issue (December 1992) Pages: 55-72
Author(s)
K Y McChesney
Date Published
1992
Length
18 pages
Annotation
Interviews were conducted with 80 mothers with children under the age of 18, living in homeless shelters, to determine how the housing support provided by kin acted as a selection mechanism for determining which families became homeless.
Abstract
The sample respondents were 55 percent black, 33 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Native American; 70 percent were single mothers. The findings showed that, more than the social and emotional support networks usually studied by researchers, what these women wanted from their relatives was the provision of concrete, material resources, most particularly a place to stay. The expectation that housing would be provided to them by family members in an emergency when they could not pay their rent was the normative expectation of these homeless women. Many of the women in the shelters were there because they had already exhausted their kins' housing resources. Four factors which determined the availability of kin housing support were identified: family structure, proximity, control of housing resources, and estrangement. 25 references

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