| dc.description.abstract | Social capital can be used as a lens to draw attention towards important features, relationships and resources embedded in environments and between individuals. It promotes an understanding that people are embedded in social worlds – relationships, communities and connectedness – which serve as essential context to understanding experiences and practices. Work extending social capital to the context of homelessness and housing precarity is limited. Yet, social capital may offer novel insight into these experiences and care provisioning. Section I lays the foundation of this thesis: a literature overview supports the conceptual review which identifies how social capital has thus far been understood in adult homelessness research. The community profiling activity explores understandings of community through focus groups with people who have experienced homelessness and housing precarity (n = 23). Section II builds on this data to adapt an existing measure of social capital. Section III comprises the main empirical elements of the thesis: a quantitative survey (n = 102) exploring associations between social capital, quality of life and mental distress, followed by semi-structured interviews with people experiencing homelessness and housing precarity (n = 30) and people working in the homelessness sector (n = 12). Finally, Section IV presents a comprehensive discussion and recommendations. Together the findings indicate that people experiencing homelessness and housing precarity navigate complex social landscapes when accessing care and mitigating hardship. Whilst promoting social capital can contribute to better quality of life, enable people to capitalise on community resources, and help to meet psychological needs, there are also concerns. For instance, a reliance on social capital can corrode relationships, contributing to a cycle of hyper-vulnerablisation. Crucially, social capital’s ability to meaningfully transform adversity and facilitate pathways out of homelessness towards secure housing appears limited. Therefore, it may be more impactful to promote social capital once someone is securely housed. | en_US |
