Social Network and Student Homelessness: Traversing Within and Between the Urban-Suburban Binary

• In Event: Housing (In)stability and K-12 Schools: New Evidence on Linkages, Impacts on Student Outcomes, and Remedies

Abstract

Objective. Research acknowledges that students experiencing homelessness are highly mobile (Cowen, 2017; Dhaliwal et al., 2021), however limited scholarship analyses their experiences navigating within and between cities and suburban communities (Colleague and Author). I interviewed LA County youth impacted by homelessness to capture a comprehensive picture of how students experiencing homelessness move within and between school districts, cities, and neighborhoods to meet their academic and physiological needs. This paper builds on student homeless literature (Miller, 2011; Tierney, 2011) by plotting youth resources onto a quality-of-life measure called the American Human Development Index (HDI) to describe networks supporting students experiencing homelessness.

Theoretical Framework. This paper combines social capital theory (SCT) and the American Human Development Index (HDI) to understand how youth build supportive networks while interacting with public policies, institutions, and economic markets across geographical space. Social capital is the investment in social relations that provides a person with access to embedded resources (Lin, 2017, p. 38). I use SCT to analyze the people, places, and organizations that youth leveraged for support when experiencing homelessness in high school.

HDI uses U.S. census data to measure “three fundamental and interrelated building blocks of a life of freedom, choice, and opportunity” (Measure of America, 2018, p. 9). The three dimensions are indexed on a scale of 0-10 and measure the quality of life of individuals living in cities and neighborhoods. I use HDI to map where participants resided, attended school, and received resources while experiencing homelessness.

Methods and Analysis. The study analyzed 23 semi-structured interviews with Los Angeles County youth impacted by homelessness in high school. The interviews followed a modified version of Seidman’s (2013) in-depth phenomenological interviewing structure, and they focused on the resources and support youth received during high school to graduate despite experiencing homelessness. The analysis involved open coding (Saldana, 2015) to capture instances where youth described receiving services and support, clustering resource codes into four network groupings (familial, communal, educational, and governmental networks), and charting participants’ use of resources within and across HDI clusters.

Findings. Three findings emerged from my analysis. First, most of the youth interviewed who lived in a low HDI neighborhood had to leave their community to obtain educational, housing, or sheltering needs. This mobility pattern went across principal city and suburban school districts. Second, the few youths who could meet all their needs in their low HDI community did so by maximizing various community-based educational spaces within their neighborhood to create their own support networks. Third, youth who lived in a high HDI community relied on their school district’s network to meet their educational, housing, or sheltering needs.

Significance of Study. This study offers a counternarrative on how young people leverage their agency to meet their needs. Further, it sheds light on the complexities of addressing homelessness in various locales and calls for adopting dynamic quality-of-life measures when considering federal, state, and local funding to address the needs of K-12 students experiencing homelessness.

Author

• Earl J. Edwards, Boston College