Understanding the Pathways of Service Navigation after Becoming Homeless

Background and Purpose: People who become homeless deal with diverse situations and problems such as financial, health, or domestic issues. Such a variety complicates the pathways through which people navigate to find needed services. Previous literature mainly focused on pathways that lead people into homelessness, but not on the service pathways that people navigate while being homeless. To narrow the gap in knowledge, this study examined the service pathways of those who are homeless by piloting shadowing methods.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews and participant observation shadowing were designed to understand service pathways. Twelve participants were recruited from three homeless-serving organizations in the Capital Region of New York State. The interviews focused on how participants have navigated services from one organization to another. Then shadowing observations and post-shadowing interviews were conducted with four participants who had offered suitable opportunities to do so. Shadowing methods allowed us to observe the participant’s meeting with a service provider and gain more contextualized understanding about their service experience. Based on collected information, we drew pathway maps that show when and how each participant received services over time. Then the full trajectories of participants’ service use were analyzed, including their initial involvement with a service organization, the total number of service organizations each person passed through, and the length of time taken between each service. Qualitative data was analyzed with NVivo 12 to draw themes on participants’ service navigation and service receiving experience.

Results: Pathway maps showed that participants had engaged with at least three and up to eight organizations in their service navigation history. Time between services varied from less than a month to six years depending on individual situations. Participants that were connected to a centralized service organization tended to receive follow-up services more promptly within a month or two. Complex situations such as multiple incarcerations prevented continuous service navigation efforts and smooth referrals to the needed services. Qualitative data analysis revealed individual- and systemic-level factors that contributed to positive or negative service navigation experiences. Positive attributes included trust in and support from service providers and agencies, whereas barriers included service provider’s discriminative attitudes and issues with service policies and coordination (e.g., sanctions, delayed system update, long wait time).

Conclusions and Implications: The findings from this study shed light on the trajectory of navigating services after becoming homeless. Despite some variances, the findings suggest that connecting clients to centralized resource centers such as government offices or multi-service organizations could accelerate the service utilization. In social work practice, the insights from this research can facilitate discussions on how individual workers and agencies as a system can improve the service referral process and service experiences for homeless populations. The shadowing method used in this study can be scaled up with further considerations on identifying suitable shadowing opportunities and reducing cognitive biases during the data collection processes.