2008 Montana Homeless Survey

Update

This webpage is for the 2008 Montana Homeless Survey. Past surveys can be reached by clicking on the following:

    2007 MT CoC Analysis Tool Page
    2007 Main Analysis Tool Page
 
    2006 MT CoC Analysis Tool Page
    2006 Main Analysis Tool Page

About the 2008 Homeless Survey

The 2008 Montana homeless survey was conducted on January 31, 2008 across Montana, surveying both sheltered and unsheltered homeless. The date is coordinated with other surveys across the nation to occur during the last week in January.

The survey was administered by the Montana Continuum of Care Coalition, local providers of homeless services and many volunteers who canvassed areas where the homeless are often found (points of service such as food banks, transitional housing programs, shelters, streets, parks, campgrounds, etc.). To guard against repeated surveys of the same respondent, the respondent's initials and birthday were used to find potential duplicates, of which 23 were found and removed from the data.

For homeless individuals who were accompanied by child family members, only the head of household was asked to fill out the survey; except for total population counts, ages, and school enrollment status, data on the accompanying family members are inferred from the head of household's responses.

For more information, contact Bob Buzzas, MT Continuum of Care Coalition, at 406-586-1572.

Acknowledgments:
The Montana Continuum of Care Coalition is grateful to the following sponsors who have supported an annual survey of the homeless since 1999:

• Montana Department of Health and Human Services
• Montana Human Resource Development Councils

The MT CoC Coalition also thanks Dr. Greg Adams and Nth-Degree Analytics for making this data uniquely accessible and at a discounted cost in order to help bring sound data to bear on important public policies.

 

Survey Analysis Tool

Nth-Degree Analytics has developed an online survey analysis tool that lets anyone delve into the homeless survey data. The survey analysis tool is in SVG, an open-source graphics format. In order to use the analysis tool, users must have installed the Adobe SVG viewer plugin for their web browser.

Note: The Analysis Tool does not work with Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or later. Despite claims of native SVG support, Firefox has yet to implement core elements of SVG capabilities.

Installing the Adobe plugin is free, quick, and easy. Simply go to the Adobe plugin page by clicking on the icon below and follow the instructions (please return to this window when finished). Once the plugin is installed, you may continue to the main survey analysis page or an alternative analysis page customized for the Montana Continuum of Care Coalition, who need the data in a slightly different format.

In addition to installing the SVG plugin, users must have enabled javascripting for their browser. By default, scripting is enabled on most browsers, but users who encounter problems may have to manually enable scripting (for Internet Explorer, click on "Tools" from the top menu, then "Options," then the "Security" tab, then "Custom Level...," then go to "Scripting").

Tips on Using the Survey Analysis Tool
Querying data is basically a two step process:

Step 1: Select the type of people to analyze, using the "Restrict Tally" dropdown menu:
Different users of the survey data will want to analyze different subgroups of the data. For instance, many users of the data only want homeless individuals as defined by HUD. The HUD Definition is limited to those who were sleeping on the streets (or other place not meant for human habitation), in an emergency shelter, in a motel paid by a voucher or in a transitional housing program. This is the definition used by the Continuum of Care. Another option is "Imminently Homeless" which includes persons who have been in the state hospital or corrections institution for at least 30 days, but are being released within a week with no place to go and no resources to obtain housing. A third option includes persons who were considered to be homeless by an interviewer, case manager or the respondent him or herself but were in a local jail, treatment facility, hospital, or staying with a friend or family or in a motel for different lengths of time.

Similarly, certain users of the data may want to restrict the population being analyzed to those in certain districts, or of certain ages, genders, or other factors. Use the "Restrict Tally" dropdown menu to add as many restrictions as you want (e.g., females who fit the HUD definition of homeless and were in District 10).

As a general tip, try to limit the number of restrictions to as few as possible. Most users won't need to restrict the data beyond the definition of homeless, the district of the homeless respondents, and perhaps one other factor that would vary depending on a user's needs (e.g., gender, age, education, etc.). Restrictions are of the type "or" within a survey question/item (e.g., gender = "Male" OR "Female") and of the type "and" across items (e.g., gender = "Male" AND district = "10").

Step 2. Choose the survey question you want to see the results for, using the "Select Item to Tally" dropdown menu.

Then hit the "get results" button, and a table with the results will be displayed. From within the table you can click on an icon to show a graph of the results.

 

Continue to MT CoC Analysis Tool Page

Continue to Main Analysis Tool Page