Joel A. Devine

Counting the Homeless

Shelter and Street Night (S-Night) was the recent effort by the U.S. Bureau of the Census to include selected components of the nations homeless population in the 1990 decennial count. Teams of investigators in five cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and New Orleans) were contracted by the Census Bureaus Center for Survey Methods Research to assist in assessing various aspects of the S-Night enumeration. Each team compiled independent shelter lists that were compared against the Bureaus lists and also undertook experiments to assess the reliability of the enumeration effort. This introductory statement reviews the design features, methods, findings, and recommendations that were common to all five studies presented in a special issue focused on counting the homeless.

Macroeconomic and Social-Control Policy Influences on Crime Rate Changes, 1948-1985

Informed by the insights of political economy, this study investigates the often-presumed though empirically elusive relationship between societal economic distress and crime. In a social-indicators model, we argue for including both unemployment and inflation rates as measures of the overall health of the economy. We contend that in the face of these destabilizing economic conditions, government engages in dualistic social control policies. On one hand, it attempts to discourage antisocial behavior via placative forms of control and, on the other, it exercises its deterrent capacities. Using annual time-series data for the period 1948-1985, we employ dynamic modeling techniques to examine these influences on annual fluctuations in rates of homicide, robbery, and burglary. The results yield mixed support for the hypothesized relationships, with the posited model gaining potency as we move from explaining more violent to less violent offenses. Finally, these findings hold when we control for changes in two other theoretically important influences: criminal opportunity and the age structure of the population. (abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1988. Copyright

Tracking non-traditional populations in longitudinal studies☆

Abstract As health services research focuses on prevention and drug treatment programs for special populations, maintaining panel samples at adequate levels over time becomes more important. Differential panel mortality poses a serious threat to the internal validity of experimental designs and the external validity of study conclusions. Minimizing respondent attrition demands systematic attention to two problems: location of subjects at each wave and sustaining respondent cooperation over the life of the research. Major obstacles to collecting longitudinal data on non-traditional populations include the inapplicability of most community-based and governmental records, inexperience with tracking those without stable addresses, and cost. This paper describes and evaluates methods used to track a panel of 670 homeless substance abusers over 3, 6, and 12 month intervals. Results suggest that a broad brush tracking strategy with emphases on telephone, mail and field tracking served to minimize panel mortality and its accompanying methodological problems.

Crime and Unemployment: Effects across Age and Race Categories

Despite numerous studies, the nature of the unemployment-crime relationship remains controversial. The relationship should be clearer for some segments of the population than for others, but is obscured by the use of general population data. Exploring this possibility through the use of a model developed by Cantor and Land (1985), a time-series analysis is conducted to determine relationships among age- and race-specific rates of unemployment and corresponding rates of arrests for homicide, robbery, and burglary for the United States during the period 1959–1987. Negative criminal opportunity-related and positive criminal motivation-related effects are found at the aggregate level, but these vary among age groups and are more evident for white than for African American arrest rates. Further, these effects hold even when controlling for the potential influence of other variables identified in recent research as having an impact on the unemployment-crime relationship.

Evaluating an alcohol and drug treatment program for the homeless: An econometric approach

The New Orleans Homeless Substance Abusers Project (NOHSAP) was designed as a randomized field experiment to test the effectiveness of a residential alcohol and drug treatment program on the sobriety, employment, housing, and social integration of homeless substance abusers. However, program staff sabotaged randomization into treatment and control groups, and research attrition was also non-random. Non-random assignment to treatment and non-random research attrition threaten internal and external validity by biasing OLS estimates of the effects of treatment and necessitate use of econometric selection bias correction modeling techniques. Results of these corrected models are then used in subsequent estimates of treatment effects on a variety of outcome measures. After correction, positive treatment effects prove relatively modest. However, subsequent analysis suggests that NOHSAP exerted a critical indirect effect on outcomes by facilitating subjects participation in outside substance abuse groups. We conclude with some observations on the policy implications of the substantive results.

Reliability and validity of the Addiction Severity Index among homeless substance misusers

Retrospective self-reports of behavior are widely used in alcohol and drug research. However, assessments of the reliability and validity of such data among certain populations are nonexistent. This study examines the ability of the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), a widely used clinical and research instrument, to provide valid and reliable data within a homeless population of drug misusers. The results support the usefulness of the ASI in producing quality data among homeless substance misusers seeking treatment. Qualitative data gathered from field interviewers are used to highlight strategies for enhancing the quality of ASI data in the future.

An Evaluation of an Alcohol and Drug Treatment Program for Homeless Substance Abusers

This article evaluates a residential alcohol/drug treatment program for the homeless. The process evaluation documents numerous deviations from the program as designed and other implementation problems. Foremost among these: The project was designed as a randomized experiment, but randomization was sabotaged by the treatment staff. Nonrandom research attrition constituted another potential source of bias. The authors employ econometric modeling techniques to correct for these selection biases. Results indicate that, although treatment effects are in the expected direction, they are rarely significant. However, consistent with the drug treatment literature, evidence suggests that retention in treatment is a critical variable predicting program effects. Clients who remain in treatment for more than a few months exhibit more positive outcomes than those staying for shorter periods.

Redistribution in a Bifurcated Welfare State: Quintile Shares and the U.S. Case

The present analysis is part of an ongoing study of the determinants, structure, and consequences of the U.S. welfare state. In this paper, we explore the bifurcated structure of U.S. social welfare spending, the differential growth of “social consumption” and “social expense” outlays, and the redistributional impact of these expenditures on quintile shares of personal income. Results of a time-series regression analysis (1949–1977) indicate that, in relative terms, social welfare expenditures have not been progressively redistributive.