C-SoDA Lecture Series Presents Zack Almqueist

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Big and Small Data for Improving the Measurement and Lives of People Experiencing Homelessness

Project 1 - Traditionally, unsheltered Point in Time (PIT) Counts are the result of volunteers conducting an in-person head-count of individuals experiencing homelessness on a single night. This resource-intensive method is widely understood to be an undercount. It also fails to capture essential qualitative information about what people living unsheltered experience and need. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (RHA) conducted the 2022 unsheltered PIT count as a combined qualitative interview process and quantitative survey over the course of a month. The respondent selection for both the qualitative and quantitative surveys followed a Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) protocol. RDS provides a sampling strategy for estimating size and percentages of hard-to-reach populations which lack an administrative sampling frame. We are running a second study, including a cell-phone only sample over the month of April. Results of the ongoing study will be discussed.

Project 2 - Homelessness has short- and long-term negative impacts on both physical and mental health, and represents a significant burden to communities throughout the US. For the current proposal we seek to provide further evidence of our ability to monitor sleep in people experiencing homelessness in different sleeping environments, and connect sleep timing to additional
objective and subjective measures of health, sleep quality, and well-being. This evidence will be critical to seek funding from federal agencies with the overarching goal of using sleep as a critical metric for the effectiveness of any intervention to address the current homelessness crisis, and as a predictor of health outcomes in affected people.

Project 3 - A spatiotemporal analysis of environmental hazard exposures and health risk to people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, Washington. We describe the environmental stressor and exposure risks to people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, Washington. We report the short- and long-term effects of environmental risk and exposures to the growing and vulnerable
population experiencing homelessness.