Student Research Ideas
If you are interested in learning more about homelessness and contributing new knowledge to the field, here are some ideas you may want to consider for an Honour’s or Master’s thesis.
- Women have unique experiences of homelessness, including housing insecurity, violence and trauma, mothering, and reproductive health, that require equally unique responses. Conduct an environmental scan of service agencies in your community to see what specialized resources are available for women and gender diverse individuals. How do they approach their care services, such as through a trauma-informed lens or another perspective? Are there recommendations you could make for organizations that do not offer specialized services to increase their gender-based programming?
- Men and women experiencing homelessness report many different quality of life factors, but one they have in common is sleep. Buccieri et al., (2020) found that one of the biggest drivers of poor quality of life for men and women was that they did not get enough sleep, nor good quality sleep. With this knowledge, identify ways in the literature to improve sleep quality and duration in general. How can you take that knowledge and use it to recommend adapted strategies for people experiencing homelessness? For a more advanced study, partner with an emergency shelter and help them design a specific sleep strategy for their agency.
- This chapter contained many words you may not have previously been familiar with: cisgender, transgender, gender-diverse, hegemonic masculinity, LGBTQ2S+, homophobia, transphobia, and heterocisnormative. Conduct a search of the LGBTQ2S+ homelessness literature to identify other words that are used in this field, but that may not be part of everyday language. Record their meanings and design a survey, such as of other undergraduate students, to determine their familiarity and level of understanding of these terms. Focusing on all the words, or those that are least understood, create a knowledge mobilization education campaign through methods like posters and social media to make these words more commonly understood and used by people in society at large.
