Homelessness Paper Essay Example

Homelessness is defined as “An Individual who lacks a fixed regular and adequate nighttime residence”, (Burt, 1989, p.17). Have you ever stopped to wonder how many people are Homeless? Who are most at risk to fall into this situation? I highly doubt it. While most people really do not care and ignore homeless people, others look at them as motivation, people whom they do not want to become. Another question that comes to mind is, how do homeless people survive and what are their legal rights. What causes people to become Homeless is it a choice or a failure of society? Do homeless individual have the same perspective on life and show the same emotions as ordinary people do. What can we do to help stop homelessness? These are the topics that I will be briefly addressing in my paper. The study of homelessness for the past couple of years has been very complex and difficult to come by. From what I learned during this research, most of the statistics on homeless people are sometimes inaccurate. Researchers use different methods to measure homelessness. One method attempts to count all the people who are literally homeless on a given day or during a given week, this is called point-in-time counts. While the second method examines the number of people who are homeless over a given period of time, this is called (period prevalence counts). Point-in-time studies give a snap-shot picture of homelessness; they only count those individuals who are homeless at a particular time. Period prevalence addresses the problem of homelessness more accurately, because some of these people will eventually find housing and escape homelessness making it a temporary condition. There is another issue involved in counting the number of homeless people in America. Many homeless people will not be counted because they are not in places where researchers can find them. These groups of people are often referred to as “the unsheltered or hidden homeless”, (Burt, 1989 p.18). These