Resilience among homeless college students: co-constructed explorations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the co-constructed resilience of homeless college students and to bring awareness to an unrecognized subpopulation that could benefit from increased intervention and support. Qualitative interviews using an appreciative inquiry lens with ten homeless college students were conducted in a rural public university in the United States. Students and researchers explored themes related to resilience and academic success while also experiencing homelessness. Consistent with ecological person-in-environment perspective, three themes emerged including Individual, Social, and Institutional factors that led to student success in spite of housing challenges. Implications for policy and practice include unique opportunities for universities to collect additional demographic data to better understand and serve their students who are experiencing homelessness. Campus and community-based understanding of the issues faced by these students may ameliorate the challenges and issues faced by this population of students. Additional research is needed to further understand resilience among homeless college students as well as how to better support this student population.

KEYWORDS:

• College students
• homelessness
• resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Pam Bowers, PhD, MSW is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Humboldt State University and Director of Distributed Learning. Her research focuses on community-based participatory research for health and social justice, student professional identity development, and LGBTQ2S populations.

Marissa O’Neill, PhD, MSW is Chair and Associate Professor of Social Work at Humboldt State University. Her research interests include child welfare case manager retention and well-being, student success, and resilience.