Research on women experiencing “hidden” homelessness in the UK

In response to the recommendations of the Inclusive Data Taskforce (PDF, 1.03MB), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) commissioned research to develop a methodology for capturing the scale of women experiencing “hidden” homelessness across the UK. This work built on an ONS evidence review, which explored the existing data on “hidden” homelessness and highlighted the main data gaps. It identified that women were more likely to be missed from or under-represented in official statistics because of the different, less visible ways in which they experience homelessness compared with men.

This summary outlines the main findings of the commissioned research reports carried out by ClearView Research.

The Scottish Government has also published an evidence review exploring the international evidence base on methods to identify people who are facing or have faced “hidden” homelessness.

The aim of the commissioned research was to investigate different approaches for enumerating women experiencing “hidden” homelessness and to propose a methodology that could be piloted across the UK. The work was carried out in three stages and ClearView Research have produced a detailed report summarising the findings from each stage.

Stage 1: Defining “hidden” homelessness

In the first stage, researchers worked with the ONS, experts in the field of homelessness and women with lived experiences to co-create a definition of “hidden” homelessness for the purposes of this research.

Stage 2: Qualitative research

The second stage involved critically reviewing and assessing methodologies previously used to capture women experiencing “hidden” homelessness. This allowed researchers to draw relevant learnings from these and consider if and how they could be adapted for the purposes of this research.

This stage also included qualitative research with a range of professionals in the field of homelessness, and women with lived experiences across the UK to discuss different ways to reach women, innovative alternative methodologies, safety and ethics considerations, and local contexts in the four nations.

Stage 3: Enumerating “hidden” homelessness

The final stage was to use the findings from Stages 1 and 2 to recommend a methodology for capturing the population of interest and a plan of how the proposed approach could be tested across the UK.

• Adopting a loose definition of “hidden” homelessness would allow for a range of different experiences to be captured, reflecting the complexities and nuances of being represented or not in official statistics.
• A short survey specifically targeting questions around possible receipt of housing support, recent experiences of homelessness, as well as demographic characteristics, could be used to capture the breadth of women’s “hidden” homelessness experiences.
• It is important to take an informed and strategic approach to engagement to maximise data collection; this includes developing strategies for building trust, maximising reach, capturing women’s attention, and motivating them to participate in a survey.
• For optimal results, a survey would need to be delivered by outreach workers, through engagement with homelessness and targeted specialist services, as well as be made digitally available in a range of locations, to allow for a wider reach of women.
• Engaging local groups and services to support reaching women is important, but for this to be successful there needs to be sufficient time to build trusted relationships with these organisations.
• Any data collection approach needs to happen over a suitable timeframe as women’s experience of homelessness is changeable.

Ongoing work within the ONS is aimed at better understanding and improving the coverage of hard-to-reach population groups that are routinely excluded from household surveys, including people experiencing “hidden” homelessness. We will be considering these research findings alongside the other work in this area to plan our future work programme.