Approximately 10% of students at Boston Public Schools (BPS) experience homelessness, which is linked to lower attendance, grades, test scores, and graduation rates. The Housing Policy and Solutions Lab partners with practitioners and policymakers to produce high-quality research evidence in support of housing policy solutions.
Core Strategies
Conduct rigorous multi-method research (e.g. surveys, qualitative interviews, impact evaluations, administrative data analysis, and system modeling)
Generate products for multiple audiences (e.g. presentations, reports, and academic publications)
Co-design of tools to support service collaboration (e.g. school-based homelessness risk screener)
Our collaborative research includes surveys of program recipients, analysis of administrative data, surveys of housing crisis responder staff and homeless liaisons,and qualitative interviews with families.
We at Boston College School of Social Work and United Way of Massachusetts Bay would like to thank our colleagues at FamilyAid and Boston Public Schools for inviting our team into their spaces and for all the work they have done to support our research, including recruitment of participating families and staff, sharing their administrative data, and engaging in the interpretation of findings.