Early Research Findings from Journeys Home: Longitudinal Study of Factors Affecting Housing Stability

• Date: 01 June 2017
• Published date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8462.12215
• Author: David C. Ribar

Policy Forum: Australian Homelessness—Research and Policy

Insights

Early Research Findings from Journeys Home: Longitudinal

Study of Factors Affecting Housing Stability

David C. Ribar*

Abstract

Journeys Home: Longitudinal Study of Factors

Affecting Housing Stability is a national, six-

wave survey of 1,682 disadvantaged Austral-

ians who were either homeless or at risk of

homelessness. This articlesummarises f‌indings

from more than a dozen initial studiesthat have

conductedmultivariate analyses of the survey to

investigate the causes and consequences of

homelessness and other outcomes. Although

homelessness is strongly correlated with many

social problems, the multivariate studies that

adjust for conditions that co-occur with home-

lessness have found far fewerassociations. The

studies indicate that the experiences and

circumstances of homelessness are complex,

with different surrounding conditions, dura-

tions and paths into and out of homelessness.

1. Introduction

The Journeys Home: Longitudinal Study of

Factors Affecting Housing Stability (JH) survey

is an invaluable and unique tool for studying

homelessness and its correlates. As Wooden et al.

(2012) discussed when introducing the survey in

this journal, the JH survey is a national,

longitudinal, interviewer-administered survey

of 1,682 disadvantaged Australians. At the

time of their initial interview in 2011, all the

participants were current or recent income-

support recipients who had either been adminis-

tratively f‌lagged by Centrelink staff as being

homeless or at risk of homelessness or been

statistically identif‌ied as being vulnerable to

homelessness. The survey asked people about

their housing arrangements and homelessness,

economic circumstances, physical and mental

health conditions, family and childhood back-

grounds, social and demographic situations,

substance use, exposure to violence and other

conditions in six waves of interviews that were

each approximately 6 months apart. Most

respondents also agreed to let their survey

responses be linked to administrative records

on income support from Centrelink. Participation

in the f‌irst wave was very high, with 62 per cent

of the in-scope sample responding, and subse-

quent retention was remarkable, with roughly

f‌ive-sixths of the initial respondents still partici-

patinginthesixthwave.

The JH survey is path-breaking in several

ways. It is one of only a handful of prospective

longitudinalstudies of homelessness, andunlike

the other longitudinal studies, it considered a

baseline population of housed and homeless

* Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social

Research and ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and

Families over the Life Course, The University of

Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia, and Institute for the

Study of Labor, Bonn 53113 Germany; email <david.

ribar@unimelb.edu.au>. The f‌indings and views reported

in this article are those of the author and should not be

attributed to the Melbourne Institute.

The Australian Economic Review, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 214–19

°

C2017 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research

Published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd