7. Discussion and conclusions
One of the central aims of SAAP is to foster self-reliance amongst people who become homeless and need to seek help from services funded under the program. This study involved designing and carrying out a client survey to measure whether and to what extent receiving SAAP services facilitates positive change in client self-reliance, and to examine what forms this improvement takes for different client groups. The research was aimed to complement other work on outcome measures developed by SAAP.
The study noted at the outset that there are some problems with the concept of self-reliance as applied to homeless people, especially in the context of the limited resources available for SAAP service provision and the shortage of suitable and affordable accommodation for people facing social disadvantage. Nevertheless, one of the key findings of the study has been that while self-reliance is indeed a problematic concept, there is still a core of agreement attached to the term which most SAAP service users share. The most common definitions provided by respondents included, first, getting accommodation, and then resuming control over their lives in various ways. Getting a job, having sufficient money and feeling safe were also frequently mentioned, while children’s wellbeing was particularly important for those for whom it was relevant. The barriers cited to achieving self-reliance included not only lack of money and available accommodation, but also problems in relationships with other people; lack of employment; drug and alcohol problems; depression, stress and other health factors; lack of support; and clients’ own negative attitudes.
The survey attracted responses from 630 service users across Australia, including clients in all the States and Territories, recruited through 75 SAAP-funded services. While there were some minor differences, the sample was broadly representative of the SAAP service use population, bearing in mind that it focused on those with more than a brief engagement with services.
People’s individual histories of housing difficulties and homelessness are complicated, and hard to summarise in quantitative terms. However, the survey shows that services often deal with people with long-term and entrenched experience of homelessness. While for many clients, particularly women escaping domestic violence, the current period of homelessness was the first they had experienced, for close to one in 10 in the sample the experiences of homelessness went back more than 20 years, and nearly two-thirds had been homeless more than once. Perhaps even more striking was the length of time respondents had been receiving help from the SAAP service. More than one-quarter reported getting help for between one and five years, and a further six per cent for more than five years. For men, the proportion getting help for five years or more was even higher, at 10 per cent. Clearly, for a significant minority, SAAP support is not just a short-term crisis intervention, but a long-term engagement. This suggests that the problems and barriers to self-reliance cited are often simply not susceptible to quick and easy solutions.
Overall, the survey provides a highly positive picture of the extent to which clients felt they had moved towards self-reliance after getting help from SAAP services. Most saw themselves as well on the way towards ‘getting back on their feet’. Although it is not possible to make direct claims of causality – many clients get help and support from individuals and services other than the particular SAAP service through which they were recruited for this survey – the strong implication is that the services are instrumental in this process. The case studies provide detailed examples of the range of supports provided by services that helped clients rebuild their lives, even though some service users still felt vulnerable and apprehensive about their long-term housing prospects. The kinds of comments offered in response to open-ended questions also showed how deeply grateful many clients felt for the help they had received from services.
The results suggest that the area where SAAP services have the most positive impact on self-reliance for the largest proportion of clients is, not surprisingly, in their core business of providing temporary accommodation and ongoing housing support. This is demonstrated not only by the response to the questions on progress made in the different domains of life (in which nearly 90 per cent said that access to accommodation had improved), but also in the changes in housing tenure reported before and after receiving assistance. These showed a significant movement away from the most insecure forms of dwelling (and literal rooflessness), and towards secure and affordable housing in the public and community housing sectors.
However, there were also many other areas of life where positive effects were identified, especially items in the ‘coping’ domain, relating to belief in clients’ own ability to get back on their feet, and to feeling safe and secure. These were also items of broad relevance amongst the sample as a whole. SAAP services seem to be having a strongly positive effect on clients’ feelings of safety and personal self-confidence. Issues relating to children also scored highly amongst those for whom they were relevant.
Where SAAP services are more limited in their effectiveness is in helping clients find work – an important route to gaining and sustaining self-reliance - although they do help some clients access training and education, and also act as an important link in connecting clients with income support through Centrelink. This is particularly crucial for women escaping domestic violence, who have to secure an independent source of income.
Another interesting finding is that apart from the length of involvement with services, and the frequency of previous homelessness episodes, most of the observable characteristics and circumstances of clients seemed to have little significant impact on the variation in outcomes. To some extent women seemed to do better generally than men, especially at getting paid work and accessing emotional support or counselling.
Whether the latter is because women tend to be more open to such support or because services are more attuned to providing it for them (or both) is hard to tell. Age appeared to be an issue only in relation to getting accommodation, with the youngest and oldest age groups reporting slightly less improvement than the 25-50 year olds. There were also no significant differences in outcomes at the average level between Indigenous and non-Indigenous clients, or between CALD and non-CALD clients – although, as would be expected, clients whose first language was not English benefited particularly from help with language issues.
This relative equality of outcomes is positive in the sense that services mostly seem to be providing an equally effective level of support for all clients, regardless of their characteristics. However, these factors only accounted for a proportion of the variation in outcomes, and it is likely that factors not captured in the survey, such as differences in client personalities and experiences, and in the relative effectiveness of services, are responsible for the rest.
In spite of the positive outcomes clients reported, many were still living in temporary accommodation at the time of the survey, and saw themselves as continuing to need assistance in the future in a wide range of areas, particularly with longer-term housing options, help with coping with personal problems, and other forms of support.
This has important implications when put together with the findings about progress towards self-reliance. The factor that the survey identified as having the strongest positive influence on self-rated outcomes, holding other factors constant, was the length of time clients had been getting help from the service. Many of the problems and barriers to self-reliance cited are often simply not susceptible to quick and easy solutions, and services may often need to put long-term resources into client support to achieve good outcomes.
Another explanation could be that the longer clients are away from the initial event that precipitated their homelessness and brought them to the service, the less potent it is in their minds. These two explanations are not inconsistent, however, as part of what services provide is the opportunity for recovery from difficult circumstances. Several of the qualitative case studies showed that even where clients had received a wide range of highly effective supports from services, and had made considerable progress in getting their lives back on track, they still relied heavily on support from case workers or other services. Thus there is an argument for seeing continuing and long-term service receipt not as a sign of dependence, but rather as a necessary part of the journey towards eventual self-reliance – at least for some clients.
As was described in the report’s section on methodology, there were inevitably some limitations to this study. Recruiting survey respondents through SAAP services turned out to be time-consuming and difficult. The final sample size was thus 16 per cent smaller than originally intended. The choice of recruitment criteria contributed to this difficulty, as some services did not have many clients with whom they had more than a brief engagement. While it should be recognised that the findings apply only to that part of the SAAP clientele who receive case management and are known to the service for more than a few weeks, these are nevertheless the service users whom we would expect SAAP services to assist most in rebuilding self-reliance. The sample also turned out to be large enough for detailed analysis, and included sufficient numbers of important sub-groups, such as Indigenous clients and clients from CALD backgrounds.
The use of a self-completion questionnaire may have created some bias in sampling towards those with fewer literacy problems, although help was available from service workers if required. We feel that it it was an effective tool in that clients could track their own path to self-reliance, and could also indicate what that is comprised of, what remained for them to overcome and how they saw themselves being able to do this. So, although this is a self administered quantitative tool, it permits deeper understanding of clients’ situations, how far they have moved towards self-reliance in their own terms, and what further services and supports they believe that they require to assist them further.
Most of the questionnaire items worked well and produced consistent results, but the layout of one set of ‘before’ and ‘now’ questions appears to have caused difficulties for clients, resulting in a loss of around 25 per cent of useable responses to these particular questions. This would need to be addressed in any further research using a similar instrument by amending both the layout and the wording of these questions, but we do not believe that it invalidates the overall method of supported self-completion.
The key items concerning progress towards self-reliance and personal change in different domains of life produced rich and important information for policy makers and service managers in SAAP. We suggest that in an amended form the survey instrument could be used in the future as a means of regular data collection on client progress. Much of the basic demographic information would already by held on the SAAP client data system, allowing an abbreviated instrument to focus in more depth on the core items. The current instrument is, however, based only on client self-assessment. This is an important element of outcome measurement as it allows clients to reflect on the progress they have made in areas of particular importance to them. Nevertheless, there is an argument that in future research such measures need to be complemented, or triangulated, with other forms of outcome measurement, including individual assessment by case managers or other service staff, and scaled measures of achievement against personal client goals. Such methods are more labour-intensive than self-completion surveys, but could still be carried with smaller samples of clients, possibly focusing on client sub-groups of particular interest.