From the ground up: Homelessness and status-centered outreach.
Item
-
Title
-
From the ground up: Homelessness and status-centered outreach.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9720095
-
identifier
-
9720095
-
Creator
-
Grunberg, Jeffrey Scott.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Charles Winick
-
Date
-
1997
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Sociology, General | Sociology, Public and Social Welfare | Psychology, Social
-
Abstract
-
Concerned with the goal of improving outreach to people who are usually homeless and living on the streets, this study reviews current efforts and suggests additional procedures. It also discusses the lives of people who are usually homeless, and how such recognition of their social standing, may best inform outreach. It describes some of the "good" reasons people may have for making the "bad" decision to live on the street. Recognizing that most people who have ever been homeless are now housed, and that most of those who are homeless now are indoors, this study makes two assumptions: (1) Those relative few who are both homeless and on the street, despite service offerings by professional outreach workers, are there partly because of the policies and procedures common to outreach efforts. (2) Both the homeless street person and the trait-centered outreach worker play a role in producing success rates of 25% or less. In other words, 75% or more of the time the outreach worker does not succeed in getting their target people to come indoors for at least "a cup of coffee." Together, these assumptions create what can be compared to a "marketing" problem whereby the sales person is selling products, which the customer is not buying. In this case, the street person is defying outreach and the outreach worker is defying the wishes of their "clients", thereby creating an approach-avoidance conflict. This thesis studies what can be done to render outreach efforts to this subgroup of homeless people more successful. It describes what techniques are needed to improve the initial engagement and educative processes of outreach. The goal of status-centered outreach, as with all outreach, is to increase the homeless person's access to professional services.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
