Young People Narrating the Meaning of Homelessness and Home

A growing body of scholarship has examined the meaning of home for individuals who experience homelessness, often revealing the multifaceted complexity of meaning attached to home. However, much of this literature has focused on the experience, understandings and interpretations of homeless adults. This chapter examines young people’s narratives of homelessness and home based on selected findings from a biographical longitudinal study of youth homelessness in Ireland. The research, which is qualitative and longitudinal, was designed to capture temporal dimensions of youth homelessness, with specific attention to the dynamics that shape young people’s homeless and housing trajectories over time. Forty young people and ten family members of participating youth were recruited at baseline, with a retention rate of 74% for the entire sample at the point of follow-up approximately two years later. Analyses of the narratives of the study’s young people reveal their constructions of home as complex and multifaceted; strongly connected to past experiences but also to the present context of their lives. For those who became housed over the study period—a minority in the sample—home provided safety, security, freedom and independence. Whether housed or homeless, the family home continued to have a presence in the lives of a large number of the study’s young people who, despite past family ruptures, maintained some level of contact with family members. While much of the literature on the meaning of home emphasises ‘home’ as a site of constancy and predictability, for homeless youth, the realisation of ‘home’ is likely to involve multiple transitions and upheavals as they navigate the precarious landscape of homelessness and attempt to carve a route home.