When we were at the Downtown Soup Kitchen, we did a card sort for our interactive ethnography. We asked two questions, (1) What do you think a homeless person would spend their income on first?, and (2) What resources do you think a homeless person would take advantage of first? Above is a picture of the most frequent answers; for income: Food, housing, bills, medication, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, clothing; for resources: Social services, Center For the Homeless (used for continuing education)/Churches (used for soup kitchens), Hospitals, and Oak Lawn.
Key Takeaways:
- It is important to ask the questions in a way that attempts to avoid biased answers. Rather than asking what they themselves would use income on, we tried to ask it in a way that avoided some preconceptions.
- Even so, people were hesitant to say that income was spent on alcohol/drugs. Therefore, there is either a misconception that this population is using income to buy these things or our card sort does have some inherent biases.
- As far as resources, the homeless population does largely depend on Social Security payments. Therefore, it is essential that they have addresses to send these payments to and/or a form of identification.