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Abstract
A number of critiques have been published drawing attention to the gaps in research methods applied to issues surrounding homelessness and service utilisation in Britain. This paper discusses the use of social identity, a theory drawn from the field of applied social psychology, and synthesises it with the pathways model, thereby providing a framework to further explore service utilisation. The synthesised framework was used to predict the uptake of outreach services in a prospective study of 121 homeless people in a major UK city. In general, homeless people's use of intervention services was affected by the extent to which they identified with the support services themselves. The study demonstrates the central role of social identity in understanding service utilisation patterns, and shows the importance of applying fresh techniques to fine-tune our understanding of uptake in the long term.
Acknowledgements
We thank all the homeless people and Birmingham-based organisations that took part in our research. We would also like to thank Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Deborah Quilgars, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Notes
1 Thomas (Citation2010) reports similar patterns across three large-scale studies conducted in Birmingham and Solihull, suggesting that the findings reported in this paper are robust.
2 Portions of this dataset were reported in Christian and Abrams (2003). In that paper, we reported 126 of the 190 cases; in the current paper, we selected the 86 cases from the original dataset that included both interview and follow-up measures and 28 with interviews only, removed those cases that were incomplete (16 cases), and collected data from an additional 23 participants. The same methodology was used for all data collection, so that cases could be pooled and analyzed.