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Road dogs and loners: An ethnographic examination of biological, created, and fictive families of the homeless
Abstract
Using ethnographic interviews of 45 homeless men, an affiliation scale administered to 35 homeless men, and observational data from two “soup kitchens,” this study investigates multiple family types that homeless road dogs and loners can rely on for support. Road dogs are homeless dyads that travel or seek shelter as a team. Loners prefer to brave the streets alone. Road dogs and loners were compared in relation to their general level of affiliation as well as their contact and support with their biological, created, and fictive families. Affiliation levels of the homeless men in the study indicated that they seriously lacked strong ties with relatives and friends but they were not totally isolated. This was especially true of loners. It was discovered that road dogs were more likely than loners to have contact and receive support from biological relatives, but both groups lacked significant ties to their biological families. Both groups described their biological families as having extremely high levels of parental death, divorce, abandonment, alcoholism, violence, and institutionalization of both parents and children. Road dogs were also more likely than loners to create families through childbirth or marriage. The vast majority of both loners and road dogs, however, no longer had any contact with their created kin. Because strong family ties were not available to most homeless persons, they were forced to achieve support by whatever means available. One strategy was for two homeless men to partner up. These partnerships, road dogs, were found to be exchange based relationships that generally were short-lived. Occasionally, road dogs remained a team for an extended period and developed into more intimate relationships no longer solely based on exchange. New action theory was used to demonstrate how these relationships, called lifelong road dogs, could be seen as fictive kin. The label fictive kin applies to lifelong road dogs because of the numerous functions they fulfilled; their formation was often an adaptation to a lack of traditional family arrangements, and because partners frequently described each other as family members.
Subject Area
Individual & family studies|Public policy
Recommended Citation
Pippert, Timothy D, "Road dogs and loners: An ethnographic examination of biological, created, and fictive families of the homeless" (1999). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9936768.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9936768