The evidence to back this up was taken from an article I found on The Leeds Accommodation Forum, one particular quote that stood out to me was made by John Rossington, who is a team coordinator for the Leeds Rough Sleepers team, "Many clients are becoming seriously ill. We believe that this is due to injecting crack cocaine." Another quote from the website is, 'He said 48 people had died in the last 12 months from drug-related problems in Leeds and there had been four drug-related deaths among rough sleepers in just the last eight weeks.' I believe this is enough to show that substance dependent rough sleepers are not getting the medical help they need, which makes them incredibly vulnerable, especially with the nights becoming colder.
Another member of this team revealed a shocking statistic, "95 per cent of our new clients have drug and alcohol problems. It's going up and up all the time."
To ensure my research was valid and reliable, I used a multi-method approach, which produced quantitative and qualitative research.
One method, which was secondary, is Internet research, my first site I visited was Shelter, because I knew it was a large charity that centres around problems with housing, but I didn't know a lot, so by visiting this site I was able to learn more about the charity and homelessness. From this I extended my research to other shelters in Leeds, including the St. George's Crypt, I first found out about this from a book, Nick had taken out from the library. On the website I read an interesting interview with a homeless man named Dougie, this is a qualitative method, but still secondary. I also found out some quantitative data, which was to do with the history of the Crypt for example, it has been open for over 78 years.
One of my primary research methods was a short telephone interview, this was with a man named Martin from the St. George's Crypt, who I believe is the Director of Fundraising for the charity, some questions were open ended and some were close ended. The closed ended questions for example, 'How many people of no fixed residence use the Crypt's facilities?' produced quantitative data, as I found out that around 60 people use the Crypt in the day time, and this number drops to about 15 in the day. However, 'What can the public do to help?' is not quantifiable.
The group as a whole formulated questions to put into a survey which was posted by Hazel on Survey Monkey, which produced a lot of quantitative data, that enabled us to produce statistics, and also qualitative data that could be analysed, this was a great way of gaining opinions from people, and its quick and easy to publish. This was also a primary research method.
I found the telephone interview quite useful, it gave us some numerical data to work with, and it was first-hand, primary evidence. Sometimes, it is nicer to speak to people, rather than taking evidence from a book or the internet for example.
The survey seemed to be really useful as well, it gave us the opportunity to view people's opinions of homelessness and their reactions in general. From studying research methods in the past, I knew this would be quite successful as you can reach out to a number of people in seconds, it is incredibly cost-effective, and the survey was quite short so people would not mind taking the time to complete it.
However, I think the research that kick started the formulation of the new problem, was the article on rough sleepers and the number of drug related deaths. This drew the group's attention to a more specific problem within homelessness, as previous research had identified medical centres for the homeless in Leeds, but this shocking statistic shows that they may not know where to go.
Some research that informed the response to the problem, would be the research into medical centres, particularly Leeds PCT on York Street. Our resolution was to direct rough sleepers to this place if they were in need of a doctor.
Finding statistics that were valid were problematic, this is because when the volunteers do the head count, they have to adhere to strict rules, which involve not going in certain areas, for health and safety. Therefore we did not have any true statistics that we could depend on, we could only loosely use them. Another problem, is that we were unable to find statistics from this year, or work out what is classed as 'Leeds', as the count could just be in the city, or may generalise to the surrounding areas.
This was overcome by not using statistics in our work, and the only statistic we did use, we had worked out on Google Maps, which was that it is a 26 minute walk from the underpass near Woodhouse Car Park to the Leeds PCT.
If there was more time available the group could have carried out a rough sleeper head count over several days, or attended a number of shelters and carried out interviews with the rough sleepers themselves.
It would have been interesting but a little dangerous to work out the ratio of substance dependent rough sleepers who seek medical help to those who don't, as we only assumed that rough sleepers are not seeking medical help.
5 things I have learnt about the design process:
- Do not try and solve the problem, before you have properly specified the problem.
- When specifying the problem, do not try and solve the whole issue, find a problem within the problem.
- That everyone contributing in an almost equal way... is the way forward!!
- Be different from the rest, posters are not original and do not solve problems, this may be the case with stencils but it is unique and non-consumerist.
- It is possible to communicate to a target audience that we have not had contact with, you just have to consider the readability more.
5 things I would do differently next time:
- Settle on an exact problem before talking about visual ideas with the group.
- Work on the presentation more, I was extremely nervous, which is unlike me.
- Have more confidence with the work, even though the group received a lot of positive feedback, I was still unsure when presenting, however, now I am really pleased with the result.
- Rely on the internet less, and go out into the real world to research.
- Update my sketchbook as I go along instead of collecting the work in a pile.
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