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Research. According To Somerville (2013), Homelessness

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Research According to Somerville (2013), homelessness is a multidimensional concept where it is more than an individual not having a roof over their head. It is where there person is deprived of a number of different necessities. One necessity is physiological which means that the person may be lacking bodily comfort or warmth. Another necessity comes from an emotional standpoint which in this case would be the lacking of love and/or joy. The territorial necessity is lacking in homelessness as well and that is when someone has a lack of privacy. The last two necessities are ontological and spiritual, where ontological is someone’s lack of rootedness in the world while spiritual is one’s lack of home and lack of purpose (Somerville, 2013, …show more content…

The second kind is called, “system talk” which went on from the 1960’s to the 1980’s and that focused more on there being a lack of jobs and limited amount of affordable, accessible housing. “Sick talk” is the third historical causation for homelessness which saw individuals dealing with homelessness as having mental health problems, personality disorders, incapacities, etc. Though these terms may no longer be used, all that have been mentioned are considered to be risk factors for homelessness. If someone experiences a large number of these things, they are at a “heightened risk” of being homeless which means that “the more someone exhibits individual risk factors and/or is exposed to structural risks, the greater the risk that they will become homeless” (Jones & Please, 2010, p. 27).
For a number of years, scholars have expressed homelessness as an event or sequence of events that occur at a point in a pathway that someone follows through the housing system (Somerville, 2013, p. 389-390). The actual definition of the homelessness pathway is “the route of an individual or household into homelessness, their experience of homelessness and their route out of homelessness into secure housing” (Anderson & Tulloch, 2000, p. 11). The homelessness pathway is part of the housing pathway which are patterns of one’s interactions

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