How do Interventions to Stabilize Families’ Housing Affect Child and Adolescent Functioning?

• In Event: 1-122 - Educational and Family Contexts of Residentially Mobile Children: Potential Pathways for Improving Child Outcomes

Integrative Statement

A key question in the literature on housing and child development is whether and how housing stability affects child well-being. Much of the literature on housing stability and child development is observational, and challenges with selection bias, contextual shifts, and events contemporaneous with mobility complicate attempts to identify causal effects (Garboden, Leventhal, & Newman, 2017; Leventhal & Newman, 2010). Further, effects of instability may be non-linear, with extreme mobility being disproportionately detrimental, and differ by the age at which instability occurs (Anderson et al., 2014; Leventhal & Newman, 2010). Effects of housing instability are hypothesized to be primarily indirect through effects on more proximal contexts of development, such as the family and schools (Leventhal & Newman, 2010). However, little empirical evidence exists on the mechanisms by which housing stability affects children. The present study uses a large randomized study of housing interventions for families experiencing homelessness to examine interventions effects on child well-being and hypotheses about housing stability as a potential mediating mechanism.
The Family Options Study randomly assigned 2,282 families in emergency shelters across 12 communities to priority offers for one of three housing interventions—1) long-term rental subsidy, 2) short-term rental subsidy, 3) project-based transitional housing, which provides housing and psycho-social services—or to usual care, continuing to work with shelter staff to find housing. Study analyses will use the 37-month follow-up survey data on 1,784 families (78.2% response rate) and 2,471 sampled children aged 3 to 17. We divided children into four age group based on theoretical considerations and differences in developmental assessments used: 3–4 (n=634), 5–7 (n=564), 8–12 (n=764), and 13–17 (n=478).
We examined intent-to-treat impacts of each housing intervention on a latent categorical variable that profiles child well-being across educational, behavioral, and health outcomes using latent class analysis. Research using 20-month follow-up data indicated significant heterogeneity with two-thirds of children displaying high functioning across these domains and one-third of children displaying elevated risk across domains. The latent class analysis for the 37-month sample indicated similar results, with two-thirds of children being in a class characterized by high functioning across these outcomes and one-third were in a class characterized by high rates of behavioral problems coinciding with elevated educational and health risks. Intent-to-treat estimates indicated that long-term housing subsidies significantly increased the odds that children age 3 to 4 (OR=2.93, p=.04) and 13 to 17 (OR=2.27, p=.07) were in the high functioning class. Neither of the other two interventions had significant effects on child functioning.
The final paper will report results from tests of putative mediators of intervention effects via impacts on housing stability via its associations with parental distress, parenting, family instability, and school contexts. We will also test a hypothesis that transitional housing has direct impacts on parental distress and parenting through provision of psycho-social services.

Authors

• Scott Brown, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Marybeth Shinn, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author