The worlds of homeless white and African American youth in San Francisco, California: A cultural epidemiological comparison☆
Section snippets
Background
Homeless youth have attracted the attention of investigators because of their location at the intersection of research on HIV, drug use, poverty and health. Homeless youth are more likely than non-homeless youth to engage in behaviors that put them at risk of adverse health outcomes, including survival sex (exchanging sex for drugs, money, shelter or protection) (Clements et al., 1997, Ennett et al., 1999), substance abuse (Greene, Ennett, & Ringwalt, 1997), and exposure to violence (Kipke,
Background on study sampling methods
Sampling marginalized populations is compromised by the inability to recruit a statistically representative sample. With notable exceptions (Kipke, O'Connor, Palmer, & MacKenzie, 1995), investigators studying homeless youth have primarily studied convenience samples recruited from service providers. This is a significant limitation since studies suggest that highest-risk youth are recruited on the streets rather than in clinics, shelters, or drop-in centers (Auerswald et al., 2007, Ennett
Two distinct groups of youth—qualitative data
During the course of venue assessment, we observed that there were two distinct groups of homeless youth.
One group was composed of predominantly white youth who spent their days and nights either in downtown San Francisco or in and around the largest city park. Though several reported growing up nearby, most had traveled from other parts of California or the United States.
The second group of youth was composed of African American youth recruited in downtown San Francisco. These youth fit the
Discussion
Our mixed-method, comparative study of the experience of African American and white homeless youth in San Francisco illustrates that homeless youth are not all the same. The accounts of African American youth highlight the role of poverty, absent economic opportunities in their communities of origin, and failed institutional interventions on the path to hustling on the street for money and shelter. Many of their communities of origin have suffered from structural transformations in the Bay Area
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The research described in this paper was conducted with support from the National Institute of Child Health and Development (K-23, HD 0149003), the University of California at San Francisco Research Evaluation and Allocation Committee and Committee on Research (PI: C. Auerswald) and the Health Resources and Services Administration Title IV/Ryan White Funds (Larkin Street Youth Services). We thank the project coordinator, Eiko Sugano, and our research staff who recruited and interviewed youth for the epidemiological study, including Mirriam Rafiq, Eddie Cruz, Brooke Lober, Rondia Crawford, Jennifer Hecht, and Renol Ratchford. We thank Philippe Bourgois, Matthew Kramer and Mary Ott for their editorial suggestions. We are most grateful to our subjects without whose participation this endeavor would not have been possible.