Addressing disparities: housing-insecure students and COVID-19

Addressing disparities: housing-insecure students and COVID-19 During March 2020, expectations for the rest of the semester for University at Albany students changed from day to day. With so much unknown about the COVID-19 virus that was destined to become a global pandemic, uncertainty and confusion were high. During the confusion, there were students who had more concerns than others: those who were homeless or housing-insecure. For some students who attend the University at Albany, the university itself provides them the stable housing they need in order to access higher education. My research seeks to understand the experience for a University at Albany student of being housing-insecure during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it differs from other University at Albany student experiences of the pandemic using oral history methods to highlight the nuance of students’ lived experiences. With COVID-19 being a recent phenomenon, there are expected limitations of current literature on disparities. Most existing research addressing homelessness only observes the experiences of individuals currently experiencing homelessness and does not include individuals who are housing-insecure or are housed in more ambiguously defined shelter. There is also no research addressing how students who were homeless or housing-insecure experienced the pandemic. This research intends to highlight this gap in research and provide an alternative perspective to faceless data collection by employing oral history methods to document and express the nuance of experience. Housing insecurity affects a minority of students, but those who do experience it are impacted in ways students who know they can return to a home do not. This is also an issue that lacks visibility, particularly when compared to the concerns of individuals who experience absolute homelessness and are living on the streets or in homeless shelters. Because housing-insecure students can live in campus housing for the duration of the school year, their experience is invisible until a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the instability of their situation. Oral history methods allow us to gain a more nuanced understanding of what housing-insecure students experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. My approach to this research incorporated oral history methods, as well as being informed by feminist research discipline. Narrators were selected carefully based on closeness to the researcher, as oral history interviewing prioritizes a balance of trust and distance between the interviewer and the narrator to optimize the information the narrator is comfortable sharing. Narrators came from various backgrounds and had a variety of identities, including people of color and people with LGBTQ+ identities. As a feminist researcher, I did not assume a lack of my own bias, as I too am a student who shared some of the experiences I was documenting. I examined my own biases and addressed them in my analysis. I conducted in-depth interviews with four students from the University at Albany, and then developed more questions based on these interviews and completed a follow-up interview with each narrator. Questions were outlined beforehand, but follow-up questions were asked when topics would benefit from further development. My findings indicated that being housing-insecure created additional stress and concerns beyond the additional stressors students were already facing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and preventative measures. The invisibility of being housing-insecure was felt by those who experienced it, compounding their distress. Being homeless or housing-insecure came with a sense of invisibility, and sense of stability was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and institutional response. Documenting the experience of being a student who is housing-insecure can begin to provide visibility to their concerns and raise awareness so their needs can be effectively addressed in research and institutional response