Sociology 498: Homelessness: objectives

Course Objectives

During your lifetime, homelessness has become a national problem confronting government policy makers, religious and charitable service providers, social scientists, and most importantly the average citizen walking down a city street. While most of you have grown up with homelessness, this was not true for your parents. So homelessness is a compelling subject of interest both because it represents such an extreme human condition and because it is new.

We have two broad objectives. Most obviously, you will learn about the causes and consequences of homelessness and about the political and private efforts to deal with the issue. By May you should know more about homelessness than 99% of America.

Our second objective is to compare how different social scientists approach the same issue in different ways. Because homelessness was new in the 1980s, it attracted the interest of a wide range of first rate social scientists. They differ in their research methods, in the types of questions they ask, and in their conclusions, By focusing on the one problem, homelessness, we can observe the full range of social science. Because our sources differ so dramatically, we will be force to think critically and evaluate which are the "best" answers.

Each of our authors brings a different "kit" of research tools to study homelessness. The anthropologist (Liebow) does a participant observation ethnography; the sociologist (Rossi) does a survey; the journalist-turned-sociologist (Jencks) describes broad changes across the whole country over time; and the economist (O'Flaherty) constructs a mathematical model. We also will take a week to look at statistical comparisons across cities of rates of homelessness. The pictures these authors paint are therefore very different because they have used very different brushes to do their work. But the subject is the same. By May you should be familiar with all these different "ways of knowing".