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This book explores the housing process through the in the field perspective of social service workers, documenting in illuminating detail the structural barriers workers encounter, as well as the creative methods they employ to circumvent regulations in order to assertively advocate for and support their clients.

"Through compelling ethnography, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy: The Role of Red-Tape Warriors reveals the creative and ambitious methods that social service providers use to house their clients despite the conflictual conditions posed by the policies and institutions that govern the housing process. Combining in-depth interviews, extensive fieldwork and the author's own professional experience, this book considers the perspective of social service providers who work with the homeless and chronicles the steps they take to navigate the housing process. With assertive methods of worker-client advocacy at the center of its focus, the book beckons attention to the many variables that affect professional attempts to house homeless populations. It conveys the challenges that social service providers encounter while fitting their clients into the criteria for housing eligibility, the opposition they receive, and the innovative approaches they ultimately take to optimize housing placements for their clients who are, or were formerly, experiencing homelessness. Weaving as it does between issues of poverty, social inequality, and social policy, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy will appeal to courses in social work, sociology, and public policy and fill a void for early-career professionals in housing and community services"--

Marginalized populations, such as people experiencing homelessness and immigrants, are seen as among the most challenging populations to study, both methodologically and ethically. Although there are basic guidelines on how to conduct research with majority populations, the relative lack of published guidelines on how to conduct ethical and scientifically rigorous research with marginalized populations can make researchers apprehensive about seemingly unending questions from grant reviewers and institutional review boards (IRBs) concerning research ethics and the safety of human subjects. As a result, there is a persisting gap in research conducting large-scale studies on these populations outside of community organizations and clinical and institutional settings. We emphasize the calls of prior research to streamline IRB processes further to study vulnerable groups. In this paper, we focus on the study of people experiencing homelessness, yet we have used related methods to study immigrants, including those who may be undocumented. We provide guidelines derived from successful social scientific studies on homelessness and immigrants, which can be used to help ease IRB approval for other researchers to gather important data. The benefits of social science research on hard-to-reach populations often outweigh possible risk. By helping to increase research on hidden populations, we can improve the scientific rigor of all research and make important contributions to knowledge.

This article discusses improvements made to the methodology of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) point-in-time (PIT) homeless census. HUD's PIT results are presented to Congress as official data for policy consideration. Yet, PIT methodology focuses on visible street homeless individuals and those in shelters while neglecting the "marginally housed" or less visible homeless who live in automobiles or temporarily stay with friends and extended family. Being a hidden population, the marginally housed has been a traditionally difficult population to study. We replicated HUD's PIT count but additionally targeted the marginally housed to improve traditional methods of counting the homeless. We improve the PIT count in two ways: (1) by extensively training counters, and (2) by using the personal networks of hundreds of counters to seek out the marginally housed. Student researchers from a local university located 333 more homeless individuals than the local PIT, of which 153 were marginally housed. We do not claim this to be an exhaustive count of all the marginally housed in the region, but it is an initial step in developing methodologies to include this hidden population when calculating the total homeless population. This approach can also improve traditional homeless counts in other cities.

AbstractRisk analysts are often concerned with identifying key safety drivers, that is, the systems, structures, and components (SSCs) that matter the most to safety. SSCs importance is assessed both in the design phase (i.e., before a system is built) and in the implementation phase (i.e., when the system has been built) using the same importance measures. However, in a design phase, it would be necessary to appreciate whether the failure/success of a given SSC can cause the overall decision to change from accept to reject (decision significance). This work addresses the search for the conditions under which SSCs that are safety significant are also decision significant. To address this issue, the work proposes the notion of a θ‐importance measure. We study in detail the relationships among risk importance measures to determine which properties guarantee that the ranking of SSCs does not change before and after the decision is made. An application to a probabilistic safety assessment model developed at NASA illustrates the risk management implications of our work.

We present the Data and Risk‐Informed Chemical Assessment Technique (DRICAT), a quantitative/qualitative risk analysis technique for assessing the risk of a potential chemical release incident that may lead to a mass casualty event in United States communities. Risk assessment is a comprehensive, structured, and logical analysis approach aimed at identifying and assessing risks in "systems" for the purpose of improving management of these systems. DRICAT leads to better understanding and effective management of risks from chemical incidents through risk and scenario identification and ranking by severity by helping community planning to minimize morbidity and mortality during and after potential events. As such, DRICAT is designed to be reproducible, evidence‐based, practical, and scalable for different types of communities and the possible chemical hazards present in that community. Recognizing that many communities have assessment protocols and response mechanisms already in place, we believe these DRICAT characteristics will enhance both existing chemical incident awareness and readiness activities while providing a baseline approach for communities lacking chemical release risk analysis techniques.To understand where potential hazards might exist within a community, it is useful to consider drivers for hazards (i.e., those factors that influence the presence of the hazards and the uncertainty). DRICAT uses essential elements of information (EEI) to identify chemical initiating events (IE) which are a part of potential hazardous scenarios. Both formal and informal approaches can be used to identify initiators arising from chemical hazards. DRICAT focuses on precursor events and a deductive approach using a hazard identification diagram. EEI data sources for community chemical hazards range from informal (e.g., social media, and local news outlets) to formal vetted databases. EEIs include systematic identification of hazards, community factors that affect hazards (e.g., population density, weather, and commodity flows), associated IEs, and grouping of individual causes into like categories. IE characteristics may vary among communities and include IEs that may lead directly to a chemical release or may require additional mitigative failures. DRICAT leverages EEIs to identify IEs to build and rank chemical accident scenarios from IE to the potential outcome. The likelihood of this release and the consequence of the release determine the overall risk.