Food insecurity and homelessness in the Journeys Home survey

Abstract

Homelessness not only deprives people of comfort, safety, and dignity but may also cause other problems, including food insecurity. This study uses data from the Journeys Home survey, a large national longitudinal survey of disadvantaged Australians who were homeless or at risk of homelessness, to estimate multivariate behavioural Rasch models of the association between homelessness and food insecurity. The Journeys Home survey includes an extensive set of measures of people's circumstances that we include in our models. We also estimate dummy endogenous variable specifications. All our specifications indicate that homelessness is associated with higher (worse) food insecurity for men. We fi..