Homeless peoples profile who live in shelters

Abstract

Homelessness is not a phenomenon indifferent to our society and most of the homeless people who have been in this situation for a long time become highly vulnerable people and in manifestly socially excluded situation, a fact that make difficult professional interventions leading to their reintegration. One of the transitory measures is shelters, a type of long-term residence resource, but temporary. In the present work, the profile of homeless people living in Spanish shelters is analyzed from a socio-educational perspective. To do this, a qualitative research is conducted -following the life stories methodology- on a sample of homeless people living in shelters, specifically in the town of Fuenlabrada (Madrid, Spain), aged between 23 and 67 years. In this sense, we find that the results, in essence, agree with the previous studies found in the literature. Thus, the reasons why they are found in shelters are usually: a precarious economic situation, a lack of both employment and alternative economic resources, a little or absent social network and their difficulty to speak Spanish. We recognize that the process of reintegration of these people into the society is long and laborious in terms of efforts from multidisciplinary teams. For this reason, some psychosocial and educational intervention guidelines are proposed, which can contribute to the reintegration of this collective