Sophie Srivastava
Major/Minor: Major: Psychology; Minor: Nutrition
Title: Unknown and Unhoused: Californians' Perceptions of Homeless Demographics, Causes, and Policy Ideas
Abstract: Homelessness is a growing issue in California, with more than half of all unsheltered people in the country residing in the state. As public opinion is known to impact policy formation, the first goal of this study was to quantify the accuracy of the public’s understanding of the homeless population and its attitudes towards this group, with an emphasis on measuring stigma and mental illness. The second goal was to determine if certain misperceptions and/or attitudes are associated with preferences for different policy solutions. The Perceptions of Homeless and Mental Illness survey was sent via Amazon Mechanical Turk to participants in California (N = 389; mean age=39) and consisted of items in 5 categories: Homeless Demographics, Opinions/Attitudes, Causes of Homelessness, Policy Ideas, and Social Dominance/Modern Racism. A Principal Components Analysis was run on the Causes and Policy questions to build subscales, and then multiregressions and ANOVA analyses were run on these subscales to compare perceptions of causes and policy ideas to participant demographics and general attitudes. Regarding findings, political party was the most significant predictor of causes opinions and policy support, with conservatives being significantly more likely to attribute causes to personal failings, such as laziness, as well as support policies that emphasized personal responsibility. Opinions regarding social dominance were associated with support for more individualized causes and exclusionary policies. Finally, significant associations were found between personal failings causes, personal responsibility policies, and stigmatized opinions about homeless and mental illness. These findings emphasize the need for interventions to address stigma and prejudice in addition to solving the homelessness problem.
