Adverse Childhood Experience As a Predictor of Homelessness in Low Income African American Men Seeking Work

Background:The parent study from which this specific investigation emerges examined the physical and emotional health of a sample of low income African American men accessing job services at a federally-funded employment assistance center. This particular analysis assessed the association between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and homelessness. Few studies have explored homelessness stratified by race, gender and socioeconomic status, and no empirical studies have examined predictors of homelessness among African American men. In addition, scant literature exists documenting a relation between ACEs and homelessness, ours therefore is one of the first studies to investigate prevalence and predictors of homelessness among an important sample of low-income African American men, and the first to explore the relations between ACEs and adult homelessness in such a sample. Our study is guided by the following research questions: 1) What is the prevalence of homelessness in a sample of African American men seeking employment? 2) What predicts homelessness in a sample of low income African American men seeking employment?

Methods:  Data were collected using a cross-sectional survey design. The survey was administered at four federally-funded workforce investment board sites in Milwaukee. A convenience sample of adult African American men (N= 199) was recruited, participants were required to be enrolled with the employment services agency and actively engaged in job seeking activities to be eligible to enroll in the study.  The mean age of participants was 34, 80.4% had an annual income below $10,000, 55.6% had experienced four or more ACEs and 23% of the sample was experiencing homelessness.

A logistic regression was performed with homelessness being the dichotomous, dependent variable. Independent variables were selected and guided by prior research on homelessness in general and included substance use, health, education, income, childhood trauma (ACEs Index 0-10) and age.

Results: The only independent variable that remained significant in explaining the variance in homelessness when controlling for all other independent variables was ACEs. None of the other hypothesized factors significantly predicted homeless, with a pseudo- R²of 12.9 %. As the number of ACEs one endures increases, the likelihood of becoming homeless increases by 16%.

It is also important to note that 23% of the sample was experiencing homelessness, compared to a national prevalence of .001%. No one who was experiencing homelessness had zero ACEs, and 60% of those who were experiencing homelessness had four or more ACEs.

Implications:The findings suggest that low income African American men seeking employment have significantly higher rates of homelessness than the general public. Unique and exploratory results indicate that men who are experiencing homelessness have higher ACE scores when compared to their non-homeless counterparts and that the only significant predictor of homelessness in this sample is ACE scores.

Practice implications include coupling services like trauma counseling and housing case management to employment centers to enhance employment, address ACEs and support stable housing.