The Use of Turning Points in Understanding Homelessness Transitions: A Critical Social Psychological Perspective

ABSTRACT

We argue for use of the narrative concept of the “turning point” in homelessness research from a critical social psychology perspective.

BackgroundTurning points are often understood as rifts in the life course followed by significant change in direction. However, within narrative theory they are not events but subjectively significant features of the person’s life-story.

The turning point as narrative toolThe analysis identified how turning points were deployed by participants in a study of homelessness experiences. Participants used the turning point in constructing themselves as agentic, reformed individuals who had gained insight. However, this did not necessarily bring positive life changes. Data extracts are used to illustrate the power of adopting a constructivist, narrative theoretical orientation in understanding turning points in accounts of homelessness.

Implications for practiceViewing turning points in this way may help us understand how best to provide support for people without housing.

KEYWORDS:

• Homelessness
• turning point
• narrative
• personalization
• transitions

Introduction

In this theoretical paper we present an alternative and novel way of understanding the “turning point” in homelessness research. Although this is not an empirical paper, our conceptualization emerged from the analysis of narrative interviews with a large sample of people without housing, and we illustrate it with examples from the data.

The topic of homelessness has been a predominant feature of housing studies for decades. This body of work has sought to examine the varied circumstances of those who are considered “homeless” as well as documenting the structural factors which may be involved such as housing supply and demand, austerity or welfare reform. Research has examined the effectiveness of policy interventions, recognizing that homelessness is not simply about the availability of accommodation, but an outcome of a complex interaction between structural and personal factors such as life events, family conflict, drug/alcohol abuse and the availability of social support networks (for example, Bramley and Fitzpatrick 2018; Lee, Tyler, and Wright 2010). Attention to these personal factors has added to the conclusion that transitions in and out of homelessness cannot be described in terms of generic patterns but are unique to each individual (Brown et al. 2012; Mallett et al. 2010). In this work we contend that biographical methods of data collection with those experiencing homelessness has helped to elucidate these transitions, and can highlight the value and importance of researching homelessness from the perspective of those experiencing it. To understand homelessness and the possibilities for escaping it we must understand not only the structural factors and personal circumstances operating in the life of a person without housing, but also their perceptions of and responses to those factors and circumstances. In this spirit we recognize the important work by Snow and Anderson (1993) whose sociological study, which embraced symbolic interactionism, took a multi-method ethnographic approach in their study in Austin, Texas. The stories they generated highlighted the agency of those they spoke with and offered great insights into how their participants navigated services, made sense of their lives and negotiated the struggles they faced. Embracing the contribution that studies adopting biographical approaches make to our understanding, we locate our own theoretical approach and empirical research within a biographical framework but also within a critical social psychological mode of inquiry. In its disciplinary location our approach is psychological since it is concerned with the experiences, thoughts and behaviours of people. However, we also regard it as a social psychological approach since we take the view that the person can only be properly understood in the context of the network of social and societal relationships within which they live. However, mainstream social psychology often neglects this social embeddedness, treating the person as a self-contained individual. Our approach is therefore best described as critical social psychology.

Biographical narrative methods are used by many sections of the social sciences and, in addition to Snow and Anderson (1993), we acknowledge the important work undertaken by sociologists such as Schütze (1993). Within the discipline of psychology, there are several orientations to narrative research including structuralist, poststructuralist and humanist approaches (Andrews, Squire, and Tamboukou 2013). Whilst we see value in structuralist and poststructuralist narrative research (Hollway and Jefferson 2000), we are not concerned here with conscious and unconscious processes in peoples’ talk nor with inferring power relations in language. We take a humanistic narrative approach which takes a holistic, person-centred stance and focuses on the study of individual case studies, biographies and life histories. We argue for the value of taking a humanistic perspective to homelessness in order to more fully understand the personal processes which may assist a person in moving out of homelessness. In doing so, we focus on how people perceive and make sense of their homelessness experience without taking this at face value. We adopt a narrative theoretical approach as it can enable us to explore how individuals construct themselves and their lives through the stories they tell about themselves (McAdams, Josselson, and Lieblich 2001).

We will illustrate the power of one narrative concept – that of the “turning point”- to extend our appreciation of homelessness as understood from the perspective of those experiencing it. We will do this through illustrative examples from our own research with people without housing (see Brown et al. 2012). The concept of the turning point is not entirely new to homelessness research, but its use has been limited to attempts to identify types of events that are thought to contribute to homelessness transitions. Instead, our approach sees the turning point as a feature of narrative accounts, and one that we will argue has real potential to be harnessed in the interests of people without housing and support for them. After reviewing and critiquing current homelessness literature, we will elaborate upon the narrative theoretical approach outlined here and explain the concept of the turning point as we will use it. We will then briefly describe our research approach before going on to illustrate, through examples from our research, how the turning point may be used as a lens through which to focus on issues of substantial significance for people without housing and we will briefly reprise and discuss our analysis in relation to existing homelessness research and put forward recommendations for potential applications of the turning points concept in supporting people out of homelessness.

Background and Literature Review

What is Homelessness?

There is no accurate official enumeration of the number of people who are homeless across the UK. Homelessness is recorded differently across the nations of the UK and homelessness itself is often open to interpretation. What we do know is that homelessness in the UK is an enduring phenomenon and, arguably, increasing in prevalence (Watts et al. 2022). Over the 2019–20 period around 305,000 single people, couples and families registered homelessness applications with local authorities in England alone. Of these, 289,000 (95%) were assessed as being homeless or threatened with homelessness (Fitzpatrick et al. 2021). The impact of the legislative and policy context on individuals and households experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity has been, and continues to be, well documented in the literature (for example, Bimpson and Goulding 2020; Burrows, Pleace, and Quilgars 1997; Cross et al. 2021; Fitzpatrick et al. 2021; Fitzpatrick, Quilgars, and Pleace 2009; Ravenhill 2008). We also now have a better understanding of the complex personal histories and challenges of people sleeping rough (Fitzpatrick, Johnsen, and White 2011) and, to a lesser extent, of “hidden” homelessness (Deleu, Schrooten, and Hermans 2021). Most of the latter are single people living in hostels, bed and breakfast accommodation, squats and derelict buildings, and sleeping on the sofas or floors of friends and family. There is also now a growing evidence base with regard to how people are transitioning to more stable housing as a result of policy interventions such as Housing First (Bretherton and Pleace 2015; Sandu, Anyan, and Stergiopoulos 2021) and similar approaches grounded in personalization (Brown 2016; Mackie, Johnsen, and Wood 2019) which places the individual at the centre of approaches to addressing housing insecurity and improving health and social care. It is in this tradition, the need to embrace the diversity of homelessness experiences, where our approach is situated.

Transitioning ‘Into’ and ‘Out of’ Homelessness

Research into causes of homelessness has a rich history which attempts to highlight the structural factors which create the conditions for homelessness to occur and individual factors as well as the complex interplay of these (see Reeve, Goudie, and Casey 2007 as one example). Collectively this work attempts to demonstrate that homelessness is not simply a consequence of personal fault but rather due to a range and assemblage of circumstances which lead to homelessness and other challenges. As this body of work indicates, a focus on why and how different people move into, through and out of homelessness, i.e. “transitions” (McNaughton 2008), has been a major feature of the literature on homelessness over the years. However, in the terminology of complexity theory, individuals can make transitions from “chaotic” to stable states and back again, but each transition that is made is irreducibly different from any other transition (Somerville 2013).

Whilst we acknowledge the contribution made by researchers who have, over the last two decades, deployed a critical realist perspective in order to attempt to better elucidate the causes of homelessness (see Hastings 2021 for a review) we have reservations about the ability of such approaches to adequately understand routes into and out of homelessness. Drawing on Somerville (2012) we also see this position as problematic when we do not understand the structures or agency involved in homelessness or, indeed, how these interplay. As Somerville et al. (2011) have argued,

If we want to understand the routes into and out of homelessness taken by people with multiple needs and exclusions, therefore, a more open and nuanced approach is required, focused on the nature of the stories told by these people about themselves, their dispositions and performance in different environments, their interactions with different kinds of people in different situations and so on. (p.560)

Similarly, Ravenhill (2008) and others have also argued, that the complexity of homelessness is obscured unless the individual is situated within their specific biographical context, in order to delineate their individual life course as opposed to a typical “pathway” (Brown et al. 2012). This is a position shared by Snow and Anderson (1993), who called attention to the role that agency and identities have in homeless “careers”. The deployment of biographical approaches to understanding homelessness has provided us with an ontology and a set of tools to draw out this complexity and deepen our understanding of how people transition through homelessness and the turning points in their lives. As we shall discuss in this paper, the concept of the turning point is one that is available to people as part of the way they narratively organize their experiences. According to Becker (1997) the use of narrative is particularly pronounced when people try and make sense of “chaotic” events and disruptions. As such, the concept of transitions, and more specifically turning points, deserves further exploration for the utility it may have in facilitating personal change.

Biographical Approaches and Turning Points in Homelessness and Related Areas

Biographical approaches to homelessness typically explore the events and experiences affecting people without housing by examining their individual biographies, often through a “life history” approach. A core assumption of biographical approaches is that a person’s conduct is influenced not just by their environment and the structures they are located within but also by their perceptions of that environment and those structures (see for example Garratt and Flaherty 2021; May 2000; Skobba 2016). Biographical approaches therefore constitute one form of research within a broader body of research focusing on the perceptions of people without housing.

Given the volume of research on transitions through homelessness, the study of turning points using biographical approaches is surprisingly nascent, although there are notable exceptions (Mayock, Parker, and Murphy 2021; Ottaway, King, and Erickson 2009; Pinder 1994). The concept has also been used in other fields of research arguably related to homelessness, such as desistence from crime (Carlsson 2012; Laub and Sampson 1993; Schinkel 2019) and recovery from drug abuse (for example, Addison et al. 2021). In addition, the ontological underpinning of turning points has also been framed in surprisingly narrow ways. We will argue that existing research using the concept of the turning point, including where it has been used within biographical research, falls short of fully examining the perceptions and meanings that events hold for research participants, whether in relation to desistence from crime, substance abuse or homelessness.

The research on desistence from crime, where the concept of the turning point seems to have been most commonly employed, has often used a “life history” approach (for example, Laub and Sampson (1993)). The focus is upon identifying particular events as causal factors in desisting from crime both within individual histories and across a sample of cases. However, as Laub and Sampson themselves point out, a difficulty with this approach is that it cannot be assumed that the same event, such as marriage or parenthood, holds the same meaning for all individuals. Such events may therefore constitute a turning point for some individuals but not others. Later researchers such as Carlsson (2012) and Schinkel (2019) have taken up this point, additionally arguing that the complexity of turning points is not captured in such a straightforward and objective approach, since turning points often take the form of a confluence of various circumstances in an individual’s life, and for the complexity of turning points and their non-linear, gradual nature. In order to address these issues, some researchers (for example, Mayock, Parker, and Murphy 2021; Schinkel 2019) have used life-history interviews which focus on exploring the meaning and significance of life events for the participants themselves. They asked their participants to tell their life stories, narrating their history of criminal activity or homelessness and key events in their lives in a way that allows the interconnectedness of these and the non-linearity of turning points to emerge.

Nevertheless, despite this turn towards a life history approach to data collection, situated within the “narrative turn” in the social sciences (Brown 2017; Sarbin 1986), we argue that existing research has failed to truly explore turning points from participants’ own perspectives. Instead, researchers have inferred turning points from life history interviews, appearing to assume that turning points and the life events relevant to them can be objectively identified for the purposes of intervention. Although some research (for example that of Mayock, Parker, and Murphy 2021; Schinkel 2019) emphasizes the need to gather data that reflects the meaning that participants themselves draw from life events, nevertheless the data are treated as a resource for the researcher to identify factors relevant to turning points in participants’ histories. Both Ottaway et al. (2009) and Mayock et al. (2021) have applied the turning points concept to homelessness in this way.

Mayock et al. (2021) focussed upon how experiences in the family may become a turning point and trigger a move into homelessness and used life story narratives as their form of data collection. However, like Ottaway et al. (2009) and others they treat these as unproblematically revealing information about events likely to constitute turning points into or out of homelessness. Although they problematize the concept of “causality” (preferring the idea of “ripple effects”), there is still an assumption that the researcher can identify key events or circumstances in participants’ lives that objectively constitute turning points for them and, potentially, others in similar situations.

Within the framework of such research, a turning point is understood as a point in the life story of an individual at which the course of their life changes direction in a significant way, either for the better or the worse (Clausen 1995). This may be in the form of a particular event or experience, a change of fortunes or even a change in perception of self and others. Conceptualized in this way, turning points are the point after which the person’s life takes an upward or downward trajectory.

Adopting a Narrative Approach

Our approach to biographical research on homelessness, and in particular to the use of the turning points concept, is more strongly influenced by narrative theory (Bruner 1987; McAdams 1993; Sarbin 1986) and is more aligned with the earlier work on homelessness by Pinder (1994). In her analysis of the life story of one homeless man, Pinder warns against simply identifying events as turning points in a person’s life history. Drawing on Denzin (1989), she acknowledges that the personal meaning of turning points is “negotiated and renegotiated over time in the search for a story that is both intelligible (coherent) and acceptable to the storyteller” (Pinder 1994, 213). Memory is implicated in this meaning-making process, such that the narrator foregrounds or “remembers” some events rather than others, incorporating them into their narrative. From this perspective, a turning point is a personal construction of a past event that currently makes sense to the person as such. Le and Doukas (2013), in their research on older adults’ current assessment of turning point events as they looked back over their lives, take this view. Their longitudinal methodology demonstrates how turning points may be narrated differently at different points in the person’s life, because of the person’s experiences and continuing meaning-making in the intervening time period. They focus on the re-framing that may take place over time, for example turning previously negatively construed events into positive ones, and they suggest that people who are able to re-tell their stories in a more positive way may have greater life satisfaction. The turning point is therefore perhaps best conceptualized as a feature of personal narratives, as multiple, fluid and subject to changes in personal meaning over time.

Narrative approaches to understanding the person are based in a constructivist epistemology that often adopts a critical social psychological stance. Constructivism posits that, rather than being constituted by personality traits, drives and motivations a person constructs themselves through meaning-making activities in the process of daily social life. From a narrative perspective, we construct ourselves through the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives. Our sense of self is rooted in the story we weave of our life, its ups and downs, successes and failures. As McAdams et al. (2001, xv) contend,

The stories we make and tell about the major transitions in our own lives contribute to our identities, help us cope with challenges and stress, shape how we see the future, and help to determine the nature of our interpersonal relationships and our unique positionings in the social and cultural world.

Indeed, a narrative approach to understanding and treating psychological difficulties has been in existence for some time (White and Epston 1990), where therapy becomes a process of “re-storying” one’s life.

The approach to turning points in our own research takes this view. Our concern is not to identify the life events that may or may not turn people towards or away from homelessness, but to examine how participants use the concept of the turning point in their own narratives to draw attention to events and people that they currently see as significant in their journey in and out of homelessness. Furthermore, rather than treating turning points as actual, objective events we see the turning point as a narrative tool that enables the person to construct themselves in the process of telling their story. And if we see narrative not just as the telling of a story but as the process by which we bring ourselves into being, then telling our life stories may be key to enabling personal change.

We will now go on to use case examples to illustrate our key theoretical points. Our purpose is not to present a thematic account of our findings, for example to explore the ways in which participants constructed their identities, Instead, our purpose is to use our data selectively to illustrate the theoretical approach to turning points advocated here.

Method

Our analysis draws on the data from a two-year study into the experience of multiple exclusion homelessness (see Brown et al. 2012) and the authors of this paper include members of the original research team. The data are available as part of the UK Data Service (Brown 2013). One hundred and four people who were at the time living in a town in the West Midlands of England (72 men and 32 women) were interviewed about their experiences of multiple homelessness, using an unstructured narrative interview technique (McAdams 1993).

Participants represented the diversity of experiences of homelessness, including those who were experiencing homelessness for the first time and those who had repeated experiences of homelessness. Individuals were also dealing with other events in their lives, for example being care leavers or ex-offenders, or engaged in sex work, substance and alcohol use or domestic abuse. All interviews were carried out by a single member of the research team. Interviewees were contacted with the assistance of a variety of services with whom the research team had established working relationships. Introductions were made to the researcher by staff working for services and the study was explained to each potential interviewee. Interviews tended to be undertaken in the premises of the services who referred the interviewee to the study.

Rather than an interview schedule, a variation on the single generative question approach was deployed. This is where the individual (story-teller) is invited to tell the interviewer (listener) their life story with minimal interjections by the listener. This was followed by prompts and probes from the listener. This aimed to provide the individual story-teller with “room to speak” (Mishler 1986) in order to tell their life story. The duration of the interviews varied; some lasted less than an hour but a number of them took over two hours. During the interviews some participants spontaneously talked about turning points in their lives, and this often occurred in the middle of the interview rather than as a conclusion to it. Others were invited to consider the relevance of the concept of the turning point to their own experience and responded to this. Interviews were recorded and then transcribed verbatim. This material was then sorted and coded by all original research team members, using QSR NVivo. Amongst other themes (see Brown et al. 2012 for details) turning points was a specific theme arising from the data. The analysis we present here is based on the 44 cases (from the sample of 104) where participants explicitly or implicitly described one or more turning points in their lives as identified during the process of data coding. Turning points were almost exclusively framed as positive by participants; where they narrated events that they saw as sending their lives in a downward direction, they often then referred to later events that had set them on a positive path. The extracts from these 44 interviews formed the data set for our current analysis, which was carried out by the first four authors. We present below three of these cases in order to illustrate our analytical and theoretical approach in relation to the concept of turning points.

As our data were created through a narrative interview, we chose a form of narrative analysis. This was based on the Voice Centred Relational Method or “Listening Guide” Gilligan et al. (2006). This method involves four consecutive readings of the narrative: A reading for an overall story, reading for the individual (the “I”), reading for relationships and reading for social, cultural and political contexts. The narrative is therefore examined through a number of different “lenses”.

For our analysis, we made repeated readings of the narrative extracts, each time focussing on a specific element such as narrative features (epiphanies, changes and past/future orientation, and emotional tone) and self and relationships (presentation of self, ownership/agency and relations with others). Three of the authors conducted the analysis, each taking principal responsibility for one third of the narratives. In order to ensure the trustworthiness of the analysis, a sub-sample of each author’s analyses was quality-checked by one of the other authors, feedback given and any discrepancies discussed.

Illustrative Case Examples

Our purpose here is to draw on our data to illustrate the main theoretical points we have made above. We provide brief illustrative case examples from our analysis in relation to three common features of the narratives that represent key themes in the data- identity, agency and personal change through self-reconstruction. We wanted to retain data richness and the principle of the biographical approach the research had taken. We felt this was best achieved by focusing on a small number of particular cases that were emblematic of key themes arising from the analysis rather than providing quotes from a wider range of participants. We draw on the narratives of three participants- Nigel, Ollie and Tina (their pseudonyms used in the original study). These three cases were chosen since it was possible to illustrate all of our theoretical points through them, thus retaining the biographical nature of the data.

Participants

Nigel

Nigel was 40 years old at the time of the interview. Nigel joined the army at 16 years old but was discharged due to an injury. He then went into the building trade and got involved in criminal behaviour which resulted in numerous prison sentences, his first at 18 years old. He became aligned to a gang that was involved in theft and drugs and lived in various properties owned by gang members. He received a flat from the Council but was later evicted. He spent periods of time sofa-surfing in between periods in prison. He became a heroin user and provided protection to sex workers in the area in exchange for heroin. Nigel engaged in drug recovery at 30 years old with the support of a faith group he had joined. However, following this he experienced multiple returns to drug use, periods in prison and was placed in supported accommodation on his release. Following this he went back into prison and continued using heroin. At the time of the interview, he was engaged with local outreach services provided by a homelessness organization and was staying at a friend’s house.

Ollie

Ollie was 26 years old and had lived at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) for one week at the time of interview. He had suffered abuse by his parents and had used heroin for a few years as a teenager. He moved into the YMCA at 18, but subsequently had multiple episodes of homelessness and rough sleeping, as well as prison sentences. At age 20 he had a daughter and had lived with his partner for five years.

Tina

Tina was 26 years old, eight months pregnant and sofa-surfing at the time of the interview. Tina was brought up in an abusive household, began using drugs as a schoolgirl, and had a miscarriage as a young teenager. After leaving school her drug use increased and she engaged in sex work. She had been sleeping rough and sofa surfing for about 5 years, and spent 18 months in prison. The year before the interview she had a baby and was given a hostel place. However, the baby was taken into care, and she left the hostel and slept rough once again.

Epiphanies and Turning Points: Constructing Pivotal Moments and Insight

Nigel’s account is one of many that featured an epiphany, a moment of realization, as he looks back on his life:

I was in prison, I was 30 and it was Christmas, the year 2000. I was approaching 30 and it hit me for six. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, 30 years of age, stuck in jail. I’ve got nothing to my name’.

Nigel presents this moment in his life as a turning point, but a little later in his narrative it becomes clear that this was not straightforwardly a point after which everything changed for the better:

I hadn’t got any money, nothing. I didn’t have my driving licence no more. I’d got nothing. So then I started thinking in a dark sort of way … I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of it … So I’d get out and I’d want gear. Well, the first it’d be a drink, then it’d be sex. Then I’d usually go one of the girls and she’d have some crack. So I’d smoke some crack, some weed and then I’d need some gear to come down. And living that life again for another three or four years …

So, despite his moment of insight into his situation, his life did not significantly change. He goes on to relate a further occasion when he met up with an old friend:

He says “Have you had enough of this life?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Do you believe?” I said, “In what? In myself? Yeah, I do.” He said, “Do you believe you can do it for yourself?” I said, “Yeah, I do.” I believe in God, I say my prayers. He said, “Well, look at this.” And he gave me this sheet of paper. Just by sheer coincidence that I was there at that particular time, in that particular place. A pamphlet on a rehab.

Nigel presents this too as a turning point, brought about through a chance meeting. However, the remainder of his narrative describes many rises and falls in his fortunes, including further periods of drug addiction, rehabilitation and prison sentences. At the end of his story, he is optimistic about his future and says “I’m a survivor and I do believe that I will get there eventually. It may be a bit longer. I believe that things are sometimes, not all the time, meant for a reason.”

It is not possible to understand Nigel’s account of these events as turning points in the traditional sense- after them, his life did not really change. Indeed, a life history approach looking for objective moments of transition into a new life would not find any. However, these events are personally significant for Nigel and he weaves them into a narrative where they play a role in making him the person he has become and in his (anticipated, eventual) change.

Both Ollie and Tina explicitly refer to turning points in their lives. Like Nigel, Ollie frames this as a moment of insight: “This is my turning point now, because I’ve woke up.” But for Ollie his turning point is not presented as a moment in the past, rather it signifies his current feeling of self-awareness and his anticipation of a better future. Existing research approaches to turning points would fail to recognize this meaning for Ollie, since it would not be possible to assess whether Ollie’s life changed after this point until some time in the future. Indeed, the story of this turning point may be told very differently by Ollie – or even left out of his story- at some point in the future.

Like Ollie, Tina locates her turning point in the here-and-now:

But now like I’m at a stage in my life where I’m at that turning point where I’m trying to turn my life around … I haven’t used drugs now for a week and half. It might sound small, but you start somewhere. I’ve only been on my methadone prescription, I think this is my third week. I’m getting there slowly, slowly but surely.

We cannot know whether Tina’s optimistic tone is justified by what happens in the next phase of her life, but she frames this moment in time as a turning point. This is evidently an important idea for her; it functions as a psychological anchor, and a base from which to launch herself into her desired future.

Epiphanies and turning points, as recounted by these three participants, should be principally understood as having a narrative, organizing function rather than as objectively significant events. They are constructions of the past or present that have powerful psychological meaning for these individuals, meaning that arguably presently has an important role to play in their future trajectories.

Personal Change: Constructing the Self and Past/future

Nigel, Ollie and Tina present themselves as, now, very different people than they were in the past or hope to be in the future. The contrasts they draw between their past lives and their anticipated futures is stark, often involving a clear demarcation.

Nigel is emphatic about the change in what he wants for himself: “I don’t want to be involved in criminal activities or reputations or this, that and the other ‘cos to me that was then. It’s done, it’s over.” His words drive home the clear line he is drawing for himself between past and future.

Ollie’s narrative, like many of the stories gathered in this research, described a change in personal values. Ollie’s orientation to himself is now one of self-improvement, motivated by the desire to provide for his child:

I’m trying to improve myself so I can provide for my little one … . Turning my life around a bit slowly, because I’m on a course. It’s a support worker for homeless people. Just trying to get my life back on track, but I’m finding it hard, ‘cos of what’s happened to me in the past, but you’ve just got to put all the problems behind you, haven’t you?

Ollie’s phrases “turning my life around” and “trying to get my life back on track” are metaphors that evoke a large ship whose momentum cannot immediately be stopped, or a train that has been derailed, something can only slowly be moved and with difficulty. However, at this moment his turning point functions psychologically for him as a clear divider between past and future, where the problems of the past lie behind him and he sees a better future ahead.

When asked about her vision of her future, Tina, like Ollie, makes a clear distinction between this and her past:

If I were to say where I would like to be this time next year, I’d like to be in my own accommodation, settled down. My partner’s looking for a job, with our child living a comfortable life, drug free. Just being a normal family.

The contrast with her life to date (drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies and the removal/likely removal of her children by social services) and her vision of the future is sharp. Tina wants a drug-free, “normal” family life, a partner in paid work and a child whose needs are met.

The question raised by these accounts is not “do these present and intended changes lead to a different lifestyle?” but “what function do these constructed contrasts and clear divisions between past and future presently serve for these individuals?” Regardless of their eventual successes or failures, their narratives arguably function as constructions of new identities that, in the telling of them, acquire a psychological reality and provide reference points for acting differently in the future.

Agency: Constructing Action and Control

Like many of our participants, the narratives of Nigel, Ollie and Tina constructed them as having agency, as able to make better life choices and to take the necessary action to achieve the changes they desired. Nigel’s words exude determination: “I am going to make a life for myself, come what may. Nothing’s gonna stop me now.” For Ollie, this took the form of achieving his goals by his own efforts:

Then I can sit back and say, “I’ve done this myself with no help”. That’s my turning point now. So basically that’s it, that’s my goal now. To turn my life around, get my own place so I can have my little one at weekends.

Tina recognizes that her goals are subject to structural forces outside of her personal control, but nevertheless vows to fight for her baby and professes a belief in the power of her desire for change:

I already know they’re gonna remove this baby from me from birth because of my circumstances, but I’m gonna fight them all the way like I did last time … I know it’s gonna be a struggle getting there, but I do believe if we stick at it we can do it. I mean anything’s possible. If you want it bad enough you can get it.

It is important to recognize the significance of this kind of talk. From the outside looking in, we may feel the weight of factors stacked against these individuals and may well doubt the likely effectiveness of belief, will-power or determination in changing their lives. However, this is not the issue. Structural factors and other obstacles that may make change difficult are hardly mentioned by them, but at this moment it is important to Nigel, Ollie and Tina to feel in control of their lives and able to implement their desired changes. Without a sense of agency and ownership of one’s life, the chances of bringing about change seem slim.

Discussion

This article is inspired by narrative approaches to understanding the self in order to illustrate the utility of using the concept of the turning point in research looking at transitions out of homelessness. We have examined and critiqued the use of the turning point in previous research, where turning points have been conceptualized as objective events identified by examining the homelessness trajectories (and exits from it) of research participants. Whilst a person may be deemed to have exited homelessness, we regard a “turning point” as a narrative construction which the person may (or may not) use to understand this change in their circumstances. We propose that through a narrative approach that is grounded in constructivism, the turning point is best conceptualized as a narrative tool, a feature of personal narratives; turning points are multiple, fluid and, in line with Pinder’s (1994) research on homelessness, subject to changes in personal meaning over time. An explicit position of this research is that each individual’s life-story is singular to that person, specific to that point in time, and therefore their current understanding of their past, present and future is unique, and cannot necessarily be generalized to others in similar situations; likewise, objectively similar life events cannot be assumed to carry the same meaning for different people (Laub and Sampson 1993).

As outlined in the Introduction, from a narrative perspective, we construct ourselves through the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives (McAdams 1993). Turning points should therefore not be seen as objective step-changes in the materiality of homelessness; instead, their value is in how they help people without housing, and those who are researching and/or supporting them, make sense of their experiences. Rather than attempt to identify life-changing events, as in the previous research we have critiqued, we argue that there is a need to examine how participants use the concept of the turning point in their own narratives to draw attention to events and people that they currently see as significant in their journey out of homelessness. Following McAdams et al. (2001) the way in which transitions are storied can help shape how we see the future; indeed, being able to tell a positive story about one’s life may increase one’s life satisfaction (Le and Doukas 2013). The application of narrative approaches to trying to understand the lived experiences of people experiencing homelessness and their meaning-making within the context of major structural factors highlights the importance of appreciating the integral relationship between the personal and social worlds of the storyteller.

We acknowledge that these life stories are constructed from both personal narratives and widely available ways of conceptualizing and talking about social problems. It is likely that the tellers of the stories told here in some ways oriented themselves to and drew upon these. We also acknowledge that our participants’ stories should be understood as arising in a context of unequal power relations (Kvale 2006) and expectations of taking part in this project. As in all research with human beings, we cannot know to what extent their responses are shaped by dominant narratives circulating in society, and it is perhaps the false dichotomy between individual and society that produces this as an issue. As Parsell et al. (2014) point out in relation to the demands of neoliberalism, it is likely that the tellers of the stories told here in some ways oriented themselves to and drew upon these dominant narratives. Our findings are in line with those of Parsell et al., who found strong themes of agency and personal identity emerging in their participants’ retrospective accounts of how they were able to exit homelessness and sustain housing. Like Parsell et al., we argue that while claims of agency, decision and choice cannot be taken at face value, they must be taken seriously as meanings drawn from past experiences.

It is important to be clear that it is certainly not the case that the turning points featured in these narratives always marked a distinction between participants’ past and current attitudes and conduct; although participants did sometimes explicitly link their current circumstances to the turning point they had narrated, it was apparent in some cases that, despite describing their turning point, the participant had not, at that time, managed to make changes to improve their situation. It is tempting to see these cases as “inconsistencies” between the reality of the person’s situation and their claim to have experienced a turning point. However, we cannot assume that participants themselves were aware of this inconsistency- or even construed it as such and we cannot make causal connections between such turning points and any improvements in the person’s situation; to do so would make us subject to the same criticism that we have made of previous biographical research in both homelessness and other fields. Our position is that we must take seriously (though not at face value) these narratives and focus on the meanings that they appear to hold for the tellers, and we have proposed that, in the case of our participants, those meanings centre on issues of identity, agency and reconstruction of the self. We argue that, regardless of the complex factors surrounding the production of such turning point narratives, they hold personal meanings for participants that may be harnessed in the pursuit of change as narrative therapy has done in the field of mental health (White and Epston 1990). Unlike Parsell et al.’s (2014) study, many of our participants were not yet in a position to craft a story of success in exiting homelessness; nevertheless, their “agency talk” may be seen as helping to construct a sense of self that, with appropriate support, could be instrumental in achieving the change they desire.

We hope that in developing this paper we can lay the foundation for more work on homelessness and houselessness, and indeed other housing transitions across the life course, which adopts a similar standpoint. Accordingly, we would welcome further work which focuses on the individual’s role as an active meaning-maker and which regards the individual, society, culture and policy context as dynamic and complex systems; these systems should be seen as interconnected and mutually constitutive: “they co-create or mutually form one another” (Much 1995, 100).

In this article we have purposefully focused on the role of the individual and their meaning-making in their understanding of, and attempts at exit from, homelessness. We recognize that a limitation of the focus on the individual might be to diminish the deleterious impacts caused by structural or personal pressures they each face. We do not deny the force of major structural factors such as housing supply, eviction, the provision (and lack of) services, welfare conditionality, poverty, immigration status and an array of other issues in the onset and maintenance of homelessness. These issues have been, and continue to be, key areas of research interest with valuable insights arising into their interplay with homelessness (see for example Byrne et al. 2013; Colburn and Aldern 2022; Furlong and Cartmel 2007). Similarly, there is an array of valuable studies drawing our attention to the role of individual issues such as mental illness, substance misuse, social exclusion, personal trauma, and these all have policy implications. We would argue that our contribution has more relevance at the level of practice due to its focus on the role of the individual as an active meaning maker in their experience of homelessness. We feel this approach to understanding turning points has clear implications for practice, particularly within the context of the welcome increase in personalization in addressing homelessness. Mackie et al., (2019) have articulated the impact that housing-led solutions, person-centred support work, assertive outreach and tackling wider support needs can have for improving peoples’ housing and wider outcomes. At the core of all such approaches are workers who care for and support those who are experiencing vulnerabilities. We propose that support work which embraces narrative approaches to working with people can enhance practice by making it not just person-centred but psychologically informed. A move away from focussing on outcomes and key events towards looking at how people talk about events, significant others and their own agency can help provide workers with the tools to help them intervene more effectively. Applying narrative approaches within support work arguably has the potential to transform professional practice in line with the development of flexibility and creativity which Brown (2016) identifies as critical in supporting those with multifaceted needs. We would however like to acknowledge that a major limitation shaping practice, particularly in the field of support work for homelessness, is the financial pressure experienced by those in the public sector which is causing capacity stresses when dealing with large caseloads held by those in social and support work (Watts et al. 2019).

Furthermore, the turning point is a narrative tool that enables the person to construct themselves in the process of telling their story. If we see narrative not just as the telling of a story but as the process by which we bring ourselves into being, then telling our life stories may be key to enabling change. Our findings thus lend further support to the role of “change talk” in approaches such as Motivational Interviewing (Miller and Rollnick 1991) and suggest its potential use in homelessness service provision. Focusing on the meanings turning points have for people can help them create a psychological space within which they can (re)evaluate their lives and make change seem possible.

We wish to acknowledge that the theoretical contribution of this article is based on data that was collected over a decade ago by members of the research team. Whilst this is not strictly secondary data, it was new data to three authors of this article so may be more accurately considered as such. The team has wrestled with many of the epistemological and practical issues associated with the secondary analysis of qualitative data. The use of secondary qualitative data has been on the increase, and encouraged by research funders (see UK Data Service, 2023). The advantages of such data are clear and include: capitalizing on existing research investments, reduced time and effort for undertaking new research, reduced burden on participants and services, maximizing participants’ time and commitment to the previous study (Bishop and Kuula-Luumi 2017; Tate and Happ 2018). As homelessness remains an enduring social concern which is also punctuated by personal trauma we feel drawing on existing data to help better understand this is justified. How individuals make sense of their own lives is shaped by the socio-political circumstances of the time, but we feel that whilst the data were, at the time of writing, collected eleven years ago they retain a high degree of contemporary relevance for the study of homelessness today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ESRC under Grant number ES/G030464/1.