From homeless to home
Homelessness is a controversial subject that elicits a strong response from anyone you ask, which is what makes psychology professor Tim Aubry’s research all the more important.
One of the principal goals behind his recent study, called Homeless to Home, was to counteract some of the stereotypes that have developed about those who find themselves with nowhere to live.
"The only thing the 400 people we tracked over two years had in common was that they were all poor," says Aubry. "The two main predictors of study participants being stably housed at follow-up were living in subsidized housing and having a higher income. Implications of our findings highlight the importance of creating affordable housing and developing anti-poverty strategies to combat homelessness." As a senior researcher of the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services (CRECS) at the University of Ottawa, his interest and expertise in mental health, social services and population health were of great importance during the development of the research. The research results have also been made available as an online video to make them more accessible.
Ottawa’s homeless numbers, according to the latest report card of the Alliance to End Homelessness, are disconcerting to Aubry: of the 7,445 individuals who stayed in an emergency shelter in 2009, 775 were families and over 1,300 were children under the age of 16.
By Camila Juarez and Dave WeatherallPublished: May 2010