In this seminar, James will deliver his final PhD presentation. Drawing on the findings from across his PhD studies, he will summarise his key themes, approaches, contributions to existing knowledge, limitations and suggestions for future research. Across this research and in this presentation, homelessness is conceived as a set of states along a spectrum of housing and accommodation types. Individuals and families experience these episodically, transitioning between states and creating long run housing pathways. Operationalising this framework within quantitative research is unique to the field and, as will be demonstrated, delivers several benefits including better understanding of the prevalence, distribution and processes that lead to different types of homelessness.

James O’Donnell is a PhD Candidate in the School of Demography at the Australian National University. His research is focused on the application of multistate demographic techniques to analyse and understand the population dynamics associated with social phenomena such as housing and labour market transitions, homelessness, poverty and family formation and dissolution.