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This paper aims to discuss the challenges of conducting research with homelessness services frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 2015 and 2019, the research team surveyed frontline staff in three cities about their psychosocial stressors and needs. In 2020, the authors replicated the previous study and expanded data collection to seven cities across Canada to determine the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the well-being of frontline staff. This report describes how the authors adapted the research methodologies to continue work throughout the pandemic, despite various restrictions.

The original studies had very high participation rates because of several methodological approaches that minimized barriers, especially in-person data collection. During the pandemic, distancing requirements precluded replication of these same methods. Research strategies that enabled staff participation during working hours, with designated time allotted for participation, was key for ensuring high participation rates, as access to technology, availability of free time and other factors frequently make online survey research a hardship for these staff. Restrictive interpretation and regional variations of COVID-19 guidelines by some research ethics boards were also a challenge to rapid and responsive data collection.

Few studies describe the experiences of frontline workers in the homelessness sector, and quantitative reports of their experiences are particularly scant. Consequently, little is known about specific methodologies that facilitate large-scale data collection in the homelessness services sector. The present research advances the field by providing lessons learned about best practice approaches in pre and post COVID-19 front line worker contexts. A strength of this research is the well-controlled design. The authors collected data within several of the organizations that had previously participated. This fortunate baseline provided opportunity for comparison before and during the pandemic; the authors can highlight factors that might have had influence during the pandemic.

Responding to the needs of homeless and marginally housed persons has been a major component of the Canadian federal and provincial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, smaller, less-resourced cities and rural regions have been left competing for limited resources (Schiff et al., 2020). The purpose of this paper is to use a case study to examine and highlight information about the capacities and needs of service hub cities during pandemics.

The authors draw on the experience of Thunder Bay – a small city in Northern Ontario, Canada which experienced a serious outbreak of COVID-19 amongst homeless persons and shelter staff in the community. The authors catalogued the series of events leading to this outbreak through information tracked by two of the authors who hold key funding and planning positions within the Thunder Bay homeless sector.

Several lessons may be useful for other cities nationally and internationally of similar size, geography and socio-economic position. The authors suggest a need for increased supports to the homeless sector in small service–hub cities (and particularly those with large Indigenous populations) to aid in the creation of pandemic plans and more broadly to ending chronic homelessness in those regions.

Small hub cities such as Thunder Bay serve vast rural areas and may have high rates of homelessness. This case study points to some important factors for consideration related to pandemic planning in these contexts.

Recently, Managed Alcohol Programs (MAPs have emerged as an alcohol harm reduction model for those living with severe alcohol use disorder (AUD) and experiencing homelessness. There is still a lack of clarity about the role of these programs in relation to Housing First (HF) discourse. The authors examine the role of MAPs within a policy environment that has become dominated by a focus on HF approaches to addressing homelessness. This examination includes a focus on Canadian policy contexts where MAPs originated and are still predominately located. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of MAPs as a novel response to homelessness among people experiencing severe AUD and to describe the place of MAPs within a HF context.

This conceptual paper outlines the development of discourses related to persons experiencing severe AUD and homelessness, with a focus on HF and MAPs as responses to these challenges. The authors compare the key characteristics of MAPs with “core principles” and values as outlined in various definitions of HF.

MAPs incorporate many of the core values or principles of HF as outlined in some definitions, although not all. MAPs (and other housing/treatment models) provide critical housing and support services for populations who might not fit well with or who might not prefer HF models.

The “silver bullet” discourse surrounding HF (and harm reduction) can obscure the importance of programs (such as MAPs) that do not fully align with all HF principles and program models. This is despite the fact that MAPs (and other models) provide critical housing and support services for populations who might fall between the cracks of HF models. There is the potential for MAPs to help fill a gap in the application of harm reduction in HF programs. The authors also suggest a need to move beyond HF discourse, to embrace complexity and move toward examining what mixture of different housing and harm reduction supports are needed to provide a complete or comprehensive array of services and supports for people who use substances and are experiencing homelessness.

Due to ongoing inequities in the social determinants of health and systemic barriers, homelessness continues to be a significant concern that disproportionately impacts racialized communities. Despite constituting a small proportion of the population, Black individuals are over-represented among people experiencing homelessness in many Canadian cities. However, although Black homelessness in Canada is a pressing issue, it has received limited attention in the academic literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine the reported prevalence of Black homelessness across Canada.

By consulting enumerations from 61 designated communities that participated in the 2018 Nationally Coordinated Point-in-Time Count and two regional repositories – one for homeless counts supported by the government of British Columbia and another from the Rural Development Network – this paper reports on the scale and scope of Black homelessness across Canada.

Significantly, these reports demonstrate that Black people are over-represented among those experiencing homelessness compared to local and national populations. These enumerations also demonstrate significant gaps in the reporting of Black homelessness and inadequate nuance in data collection methods, which limit the ability of respondents to describe their identity beyond “Black.”

This research provides an unprecedented examination of Black homelessness across Canada and concludes with recommendations to expand knowledge on this important and under-researched issue, provide suggestions for future iterations of homeless enumerations and facilitate the development of inclusive housing policy.

People experiencing homelessness are high-users of hospital care in Canada. To better understand the scope of the issue, and how these patients are discharged from hospital, a national survey of key stakeholders was conducted in 2017. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness distributed an online survey to their network of members through e-mail and social media. A sample of 660 stakeholders completed the mixed-methods survey, including those in health care, non-profit, government, law enforcement and academia.

Results indicate that hospitals and homelessness sector agencies often struggle to coordinate care. The result is that these patients are usually discharged to the streets or shelters and not into housing or housing with supports. The health care and homelessness sectors in Canada are currently structured in a way that hinders collaborative transfers of patient care. The three primary and inter-related gaps raised by survey participants were: communication, privacy and systems pressures.

The findings are limited to those who voluntarily completed the survey and may indicate self-selection bias. Results are limited to professional stakeholders and do not reflect patient views.

Identifying systems gaps from the perspective of those who work within health care and homelessness sectors is important for supporting system reforms.

This survey was the first to collect nationwide stakeholder data on homelessness and hospital discharge in Canada. The findings help inform policy recommendations for more effective systems alignment within Canada and internationally.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on comparing background characteristics, self‐efficacy, and family support of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and of veteran Israelis who join therapeutic communities in Israel, and their adjustment to these communities. The aim of this research was to examine whether therapeutic communities are an appropriate rehabilitative setting for immigrants who come from a different cultural background.

The study sample consisted of 213 people with addictions, who were being treated in therapeutic communities in Israel: 110 were Israeli‐born and 103 were immigrants from the FSU. The data in the present study are based on questionnaires, which the participants completed upon their arrival into the communities: socio‐demographic data; perceived self‐efficacy in resisting the temptation of drugs; and family support. The dropout rates from the therapeutic communities were also examined.

The findings indicate that the addicts who immigrated from the FSU had lower self‐efficacy in resisting high‐risk drug situations as well as lower levels of family support, whereas the dropout rate from the treatment program was considerably higher among the Israeli‐born participants.

The findings suggest that the therapeutic community is an appropriate setting for addicts from the FSU, and that they had a lower dropout rate than did the Israeli‐born addicts. Thus, the main value of this research is that it suggests that the communities are an appropriate rehabilitative setting for the immigrants.

Postcards have been sold by the billions over the past 100 years or so, but you never would recognize their popularity by checking library holdings. Most libraries ignore them, yet a reporter observed at the 1981 national poster and postcard show: “Postcard collection—a nostalgic pastime that has become a consuming passion for thousands of Americans—is more popular today than when picture postcards first caught on at the turn of the century.” Among the dealers of new cards, Kennard Harris says that “in the past five years there has been an explosion of museum postcard publishing and sales in this country.”

The hygiene factor is always imperative when customers consider a certain restaurant, and the information contained in customer reviews can be an efficient approach to gauge a restaurant's hygiene during gaps in the official inspection. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether information obtained from online reviews could predict the upcoming hygiene rating, specifically, evaluating the impact of both qualitative and quantitative content of reviews on the restaurant hygiene rating.

The quantitative research method with big data analytic techniques was applied in this study. In total, 127,656 pieces of data collected from 1,710 restaurants in four major cities in the USA were used in the analysis. Both quantitative factors (i.e. reviewer's numerical rating, days to review, readability, useful/funny/cool) and qualitative factors (i.e. eight emotional dimensions of textual reviews) were analyzed from the online customer reviews and considered in predicting the restaurant's hygiene rating.

Six out of eight emotional dimensions including anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and trust were identified as having significant influences on the restaurant hygiene ratings. While three quantitative variables including days to review, readability and usefulness were identified with significant impacts on the dependent variable of restaurant hygiene rating.

This study opens an avenue for innovative research that establishes a connection between customers' reviews and restaurants' inspection systems. The results allow restaurants to predict an impending hygiene inspection rating upon dynamic assessment of review content and aid in adjusting hygiene measures accordingly.

Taking the researchers’ perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine the types of context information needed to preserve data’s meaning in ways that support data reuse.

This paper is based on a qualitative study of 105 researchers from three disciplinary communities: quantitative social science, archaeology and zoology. The study focused on researchers’ most recent data reuse experience, particularly what they needed when deciding whether to reuse data.

Findings show that researchers mentioned 12 types of context information across three broad categories: data production information (data collection, specimen and artifact, data producer, data analysis, missing data, and research objectives); repository information (provenance, reputation and history, curation and digitization); and data reuse information (prior reuse, advice on reuse and terms of use).

This paper extends digital curation conversations to include the preservation of context as well as content to facilitate data reuse. When compared to prior research, findings show that there is some generalizability with respect to the types of context needed across different disciplines and data sharing and reuse environments. It also introduces several new context types. Relying on the perspective of researchers offers a more nuanced view that shows the importance of the different context types for each discipline and the ways disciplinary members thought about them. Both data producers and curators can benefit from knowing what to capture and manage during data collection and deposit into a repository.

Professionals and academics alike hold polarized opinions about Bitcoin’s purpose and its fundamental value. This paper aims to describe Bitcoin’s unique features that make it such an intriguing asset and proposes a new way to consider Bitcoin and its underlying value.

In this paper the author discusses Bitcoin’s defining features that make it a unique asset. The author argues that Bitcoin should not be considered as a single purpose asset only, but rather as a new digital financial asset serving several functions, at least partially. The author discusses the role of Bitcoin in the traditional financial system, contrasts Bitcoin to gold, considers the implications of the continuance of expansionary policies on Bitcoin and discusses the impact of the emergence of cryptocurrencies as a new asset class on public policies.

In addition to functioning as a means of payment (at least partially) and a diversification tool, part of Bitcoin’s value proposition stems from its worth as a short position on modern expansionary monetary policies. Indeed, Bitcoin’s value should rise if expansionary monetary policies are maintained, amounting to a tool to short these policies, which should be considered in future attempts to value Bitcoin.

The author adds a new layer to the ongoing thought process by arguing of a function played by Bitcoin unaccounted for thus far by the literature. Additionally, the author describes the features and mechanisms, allowing Bitcoin to play that role.