Cymone Bell

                                                           Cymone Bell

                                                             535 words

Revisiting the Contact Hypothesis: The Case of Public Exposure to Homelessness

In this article it examines the findings of people's attitudes towards homelessness and how the homeless are stigmatized within society. The article puts forth that people tend to become prejudice and because of this attitude they are ignorant to the fact that not all homeless people are on drugs, are alcoholics nor do all fall under the category of having a mental illness. This way of thinking is ignorant and because there are a lot of people who give homeless people these types of labels, this continues to perpetuate the negative outlook on homelessness. One of the major ways to reduce prejudice is to expose people what they are prejudice against. People with the lowest exposure of homelessness have the most negative attitudes when it comes to this huge issue. If people took the time to volunteer at homeless shelters or even go out to talk to homeless people, maybe their perception might change. The article also takes a look at many different dependent variables that may attribute to homelessness and how many people believed that this may be caused by structural or individual causes.  The structural causes included dimensions of a shortage of affordable housing, the economic system and government aid while the people who looked at homelessness on an individual cause believed that this was either due to laziness, substance abuse or the homeless just being irresponsible and while these are the dependent variables that were looked upon, the article also exposes such factors like race, gender, age and education and how these factors also play a huge part in the increase or decrease of sympathy towards the homeless. The findings overall shows that the more exposed people are to homelessness then the more positive response that they'll have.

Intimate apartheid: Ethnic dimensions of habitus among homeless heroin injectors;

In this article it takes a look at how African Americans, Whites and Latinos use drugs in different ways. African Americans and Whites prefer IV and heroin use and inject the drug inside themselves with a needle into their veins. Whites, although they like using an IV, they tend to want to be more careful about over using their veins and usually White heroin addicts would rather or usually poke themselves anywhere to avoid using the same veins. African Americans on the other hand aren't as careful about this. There is also a distinguish finding on how Whites and African Americans get their money. Whites beg and usually work part time and would do things like recycle cans and there is also the notion that white heroin drug addicts take pride in their work, while on the other hand the article examines how African Americans panhandle and they don't do too much work. They may do part time work that may just last a minute. In the article the authors also take a look at how homeless heroin addicts have adopted this sense of discrimination within society and how African American homeless heroin addicts feel like they are treated like second class citizens and the authors suggest that this may have something to do with the structural historical method of slavery.