Overview
YAAH’s partnership with Covenant House was established in 2023 with the primary objective of conducting community-informed research toward the goal of preventing youth homelessness.
Specifically, our research with Covenant House aimed to better understand effective youth homelessness prevention strategies among six sub-populations that are overrepresented in the youth homeless population.
- LGBTQ+ Youth of Color
- Immigrant and Undocumented Youth
- Parenting and Pregnant Young People
- LatinX
- Survivors of Human Trafficking
- Native and Indigenous
Our research partnership has 3 objectives:
- Conduct and write up a scoping review of the youth homelessness prevention literature for our six target populations.
- Collect qualitative and quantitative data from young people affiliated with Covenant House to investigate current homelessness prevention strategies.
- Design, implement, and evaluate an internship for young people affiliated with Covenant House to advance their understanding of research processes and promote personal and professional development.
In order to meet our objectives, we will employ a mixed-methods, sequential exploratory design. This means insights gleaned from research tasks and data collection will inform questions asked in subsequent data collection. For example, findings from our scoping review will be used, in part, to inform questions asked in focus groups with specific populations (i.e., our six target populations). Subsequently, findings from the focus groups will further specify questions asked in the final survey.