In spite of the great public concern regarding the health and mental health of nomeless people in general, and homeless families in particular, there have only been a few studies which document carefully examine the status of homeless women, and fewer still which provide systematically-collected information on the status of homeless children. This study adopts the idea of a continuum of residential stability to describe the variety of different arrangements which are subsumed under the categories if 'homeless' and """"""""domiciled"""""""", and examines the characteristics of women and children who are living at different points on this continuum. Subjects will be 300 mothers and 360 of their children who are living in the shelters or transitional housing programs in Baltimore and 150 women and 200 of their children selected from low-income public housing projects in the same area. An additional sample of 150 low-income domiciled women and 200 of their children will be drawn from community psychiatric clinics to ensure that the study will include adequate numbers of domiciled mentally ill women for making comparisons with homeless mentally ill women. Children who are not living with their mothers, but who have been placed in foster-care or similar rrangements, will also be examined. Standardized instruments will be used to gather wide variety of information concerning social and health history from the mothers and to make formal psychiatric diagnoses. Standardized evaluation instruments will also be used with the children to document their developmental status and current emotional symptoms. Data will be analysed to provide comparisons between homeless women and low-income domiciled women, and mentally ill women who are homeless and those who are domiciled. Children in homeless families will be compared with children in domiciled families and children of mentally ill women with children of non-mentally ill women. Strenuous efforts will be made to keep track of the families, so that follow-up reassessment of mothers and children 12.and 24 months after the initial interview. These data will provide information about the success of the homelss families in becoming more stable in their residential arrangements and will document differences in developmental progress between homeless and domiciled children.
