Estimating the rate of rural homelessness: A study of nonurban Ohio - ARCHIVED

Recently, much effort has been directed towards counting and characterizing the homeless. Most of this work, however, has focused on homeless persons in urban areas. In this paper, we describe efforts to estimate the rate of homelessness in nonurban counties in Ohio. The methods for locating homeless persons and even the definition of homelessness are different in rural areas where there are fewer institutions for sheltering and feeding the homeless. There may also be a problem with using standard survey sampling estimators, which typically require large population sizes, large sample sizes, and small sampling fractions. We describe a survey of homeless persons in nonurban Ohio and present a simulation study to assess the usefulness of standard estimators for a population proportion from a stratified cluster sample.