Housing First: a new approach to help homeless people in Barcelona

Last registered on December 13, 2017

View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Housing First: a new approach to help homeless people in Barcelona

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0002291

Initial registration date

October 23, 2017

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

October 24, 2017, 1:02 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated

December 13, 2017, 4:38 AM EST

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country

Spain

Region

Catalunya

Primary Investigator

Name

Jordi Sanz

Affiliation

Catalan Institute of Public Policy Evaluation

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Laura Kirchner

PI Affiliation

Catalan Institute of Public Policy Evaluation

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2015-06-01

End date

2018-06-30

Keywords

Welfare

Additional Keywords

Homelessness, Housing

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Abstract

The Barcelona City council launched in 2015 a Housing First pilot programme to test a new approach to help homeless people in the city. The pilot programme, similar to other Housing First programmes, provides secure housing to long-term rough sleepers with no housing readiness requirements. Complementary socio-educative support is also offered to help them integrate into society. The pilot seeks to test the effectivity of the Housing First approach in Barcelona in relation to its objectives. The experimental design of the programme will allow randomly selecting participants from the target population (long-term rough sleepers in Barcelona) and comparing their outcomes to those who have not been selected to participate. The evaluation aims to understand whether the Housing First programme improves participants´ health status and quality of life, decision making ability and personal autonomy, social inclusion and economic independence.

External Link(s)

Sponsor of the program and the evaluation: Barcelona City Council

Registration Citation

Citation

Kirchner, Laura and Jordi Sanz. 2017. "Housing First: a new approach to help homeless people in Barcelona." AEA RCT Registry. December 13. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.2291-4.0

Former Citation

Kirchner, Laura and Jordi Sanz. 2017. "Housing First: a new approach to help homeless people in Barcelona." AEA RCT Registry. December 13. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/2291/history/23939

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

The Housing First programme launched in Barcelona provides housing to long-term rough sleepers in the city of Barcelona with no “housing readiness” requirements. Additionally, socio-educative support is offered to facilitate social inclusion.

Intervention Start Date

2015-06-01

Intervention End Date

2018-05-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

• Quality of life and health
• Personal recovery
• General self-efficacy
• Social relations

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

• Quality of life and health: Rough-sleeping affects negatively health conditions and consequently homeless people life quality. Therefore, it is key to measure health status to assess the effectivity of the intervention. Measured using the Health Questionnaire SF-36 (Vilagut et al. 2005)

• Recovery: Recovering from a mental health problem or substance addiction is part of a personal transformation contributing to improve one’s ability to take decisions and participation in social networks. Measured using an adaptation of the questionnaire Stages of Recovery (STORI) (Andresen, Caputi, and Oades 2006)

• General self-efficacy: Rough-sleeping also affects the ability to deal with and solve day-to-day problems as well as self-perception and the confidence to face these. Thus, an important outcome of the programme should be the ability to overcome day-to-day challenges and achieve one’s day-to-day objetives. Measured using the General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer and Baessler 1996)

• Social relations: Social networks will be progressively lost after some time sleeping in the streets. We should expect an improvement in social network and personal relations after participating in the programme. Measured using a questionnaire about social networks developed by (García-Cubillana et al. 2006)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

n.a.

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

n.a.

Experimental Design

The programme offered 50 places (50 single apartments). Out of 139 eligible homeless people, 19 were randomly selected to form the “reserve group”. From the 120 remaining individuals, 50 were randomly assigned to treatment (i.e. be offered a single apartment and additional socio-educative support) and the remaining 70 were assigned to the control group.

Experimental Design Details

Randomization Method

Randomization done in office by a computer

Randomization Unit

long-term rough sleepers (>1 year sleeping in the streets)

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

Sample size: planned number of observations

139 long-term rough sleepers

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

19 in reserve group, 50 in treatment group, 70 in control group

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

For this study we calculated a standardised MDE for a sample of 120 people, assuming a=0.05 and b=0.8 and the proportion of people assigned to treatment was 0.4 - no prior studies were available with comparable outcomes. The standarised MDE was the capaccity to detect a medium effect in terms of Cohen's coefficient effec size.

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB