Ethics and research approaches to homeless populations

Giving a voice to excluded citizens is increasingly seen as important across Europe. It is therefore important to seek to:

• Gain the views and life experience of those who are homeless
  
• Integrate those views and life experience of the homeless with the statistical information required for the provision of services.

The network partners from Denmark and Netherlands already have expertise in this area whilst the UK team is developing such investigation. Issues of the voice of the homeless will be addressed in three workpackages, from WP3 through to WP5.

Seeking the voice of the homeless and using statistical information collected by shelters or hostels, raises ethical issues in relation to research with the socially excluded. Work-packages 4 and 5 also address the task of gathering sensitive information and protecting the identity of the respondent, whilst providing support for the respondent.

Members of the thematic network have all adopted their own criterion for collecting information from homeless populations and accepted their own rules for working with this community for research purposes. One of the purposes of CUHP is to share different papers on the ethical issues associated with researching homeless populations.

Individual papers used by different research teams are provided on this page of the website, prior to the discussion in Work-packages 4 and 5 in November 2004 and March 2005.

- Paper on Ethics from INED by Jean-Marie Firdion, Maryse Marpsat and Michel Bozon

Click on Contact Us to send us your own ethnic guidelines for research in this field.