Naloxone Practice and Lived Experience, (Upcoming) 

In Conjunction with UNC Injury Prevention Research Center, the Opioid Data Lab, and FDA

 

Elucidating Pathways to Polydrug Use and Overdose in North Carolina, (Ongoing) 

In Conjunction with UNC Injury Prevention Research Center and the School of Public Health

 

Risk and Protective Factors of Polydrug Overdose in North Carolina, (Ongoing) 

In Conjunction with UNC Injury Prevention Research Center and the School of Public Health

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/0BGqBG_-vUuECAmrFq_FrA/project-details/10579463#description

 

Exploring Intravenous Injection Behaviors, Knowledge, and Drug Preferences of Individuals Injecting Prescription Opioids and/or Prescription Stimulants, (Ongoing) 

In Conjunction with UNC Injury Prevention Research Center and the Opioid Data Lab

 

Evaluation of State-Mandated Acute and Post-Surgical Pain-Specific Opioid Prescribing Guidelines (2019-2022)

In Conjunction with UNC Injury Prevention Research Center and the Opioid Data Lab

Please see https://www.opioiddata.org/studies/nc-stop-act-evaluation for more information about this study

“On the Street” and “Of the Street”: The Daily Lives of Unhoused Youth in Hollywood (2001-2009)

Dissertation Committee: Robert Emerson, Jack Katz, David Snow, Robert Edgerton

Unhoused youth who live on the streets (commonly referred to as “street kids”) are the most understudied sub-culture of the homeless and little time has been spent describing their lives on the streets. My dissertation works to fill this gap by exploring the daily lives of unhoused youth who live on the streets of Hollywood.  

This research utilizes ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews. I shift away from shelter-based methodologies to more street-centered approaches by shadowing unhoused youth in their daily lives, recruiting participants from drop-in centers and other street-based locations, allowing unhoused youth to suggest sampling locations, and seeking out those unhoused youth who are not easily identifiable. In this way, I move beyond previous studies that have generally focused on agency concerns (e.g., street kids’ relation to service institutions) to an exploration of the world of the unhoused youth as they see it.

Part one, chapters 1-3, examines the daily lives of unhoused youth living on the streets of Hollywood from the time an unhoused youth arrives on the streets to the time the youth either exits the streets or joins the ranks of the adult homeless.  Chapter 1 describes street life for the newly unhoused youth.  Chapter 2 describes how unhoused youth make it on the streets including receiving help from others, making money, spending money, passing time and having fun, finding and keeping a spot (i.e., a place to sleep), and staying safe and protected.  Chapter 3 addresses the issue of exit—that is, what factors promote or impede an unhoused youth’s desire and/or attempt(s) to leave the streets.  

Contrary to the tendency of existing research to emphasize deviance as a central quality of unhoused youth, part one demonstrates that this emphasis is largely a consequence of these studies focusing on particularly deviant youth (i.e., gutterpunks) and/or on unhoused youth’s participation in illicit activities (i.e., drug use, panhandling, prostitution, theft), as well as the erroneous assumption that the vast majority of unhoused youth are visibly identifiable either by their physical appearance or by the illicit activities in which they engage.  In fact, the lives of unhoused youth do not consist solely of a series of deviant acts.  While some unhoused youth are heavily engaged in illicit activities (e.g., drug use, petty crime, panhandling) and regularly present visibly deviant public persona, others participate in such activities only occasionally or episodically, and still others avoid them almost completely, seeking to avoid public identification as being deviant.   Furthermore, any particular unhoused youth may, at times, participate in illicit activities, and at other times wholeheartedly pursue a variety of “normal,” mainstream activities.  In this sense, unhoused youth are often “of the street” – publicly aligning with activities and identities based on the illicit and quasi-illicit activities that organize much of the living of everyday life on the streets – and “on the streets” – engaging in mainstream activities and seeking to project conventional public identities despite lacking any conventional residence.  Thus, as most unhoused youth participate in both the illicit world of the street and the conventional world of mainstream society, they are more accurately described as occupying a liminal social position.  This is the focus of part two.

Part two of the dissertation, chapters 4-7, builds on the details of unhoused youth’s daily lives presented in part one to examine the liminal social position that these youth often occupy.  Chapter 4 begins by describing how current typologies do not accurately describe unhoused youth.  Then, after detailing the ways in which unhoused youth distinguish among their ranks and the self-identities that they profess, it outlines why unhoused youth are more appropriately analyzed using a continuum with the endpoints “on the street” and “of the street” at either end, rather than categories.  Chapter 5 addresses the appearances, talk, and activities of unhoused youth that explicitly claim and/or align with an “on the street” identity, as well as the interactional strategies they use to conceal their unhoused identity since their participation in mainstream activities is often contingent on not being recognized as homeless.  Parallel to Chapter 5, Chapter 6 turns to an exploration of unhoused youth’s names and appearances, their talk, and the activities in which they engage that explicitly claim and/or align with an “of the street” identity as well as the reasons the youth choose to engage in deviant behaviors.  Chapter 7 uses the criteria presented in chapters 4, 5, and 6 and a series of case studies to then demonstrate how the “on the street” and “of the street” identity claims and alignments of particular unhoused youth vary over time and by location, reinforcing the assertion that unhoused youth occupy a liminal social position.

This has significant policy implications as the imagery of the lone unhoused youth who is, at best, connected to a few other unhoused youth and cut-off from the larger mainstream society must be replaced by an image of one who is interconnected with many others, including those who are not in street life.

 

An Ethnographic Study of a Mobile HIV Testing Van (2002-2003)

This ethnographic project, which consisted of intensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, was part of a larger NIMH-supported project, “”Organizational Factors in the Early Detection of HIV,” (Principal Investigator, Oscar Grusky, UCLA Sociology Department,NIMH-MH62709).  There were six sites in total and a single ethnographer was assigned to each site.  

I carried out my research for one year at a mobile van that was located in areas frequented by gay men and/or transgender prostitutes.  For the larger study, I explored questions related to HIV testing, including barriers to testing, institutional and personal reasons that an individual decided to get tested,  factors influencing service providers’ decisions to test an individual, and how service providers handled test results.  

Since most clients reported having no intention of being testing until they happened upon the mobile unit,  I became particularly interested in the initial interaction that took place between passersby and the staff of the mobile van.  I developed a typology of passersby (e.g., direct requesters, questioners, window-shoppers, speed-walkers) based on the 7 strategies individuals used to negotiate the presence of the mobile unit in public space.  I then examined the different interactional strategies that staff used (from passive non-engagement to direct solicitation) when responding to these various types and the subsequent success in moving a ‘potential’ tester to an ‘active’ tester.  Results indicated that, overall, indirect solicitation in the form of providing information and condoms followed by direct solicitation was the most successful strategy across types. 

 

An Ethnography of a Drop-In Center for Street Kids (2001-2002)

At any given time, the majority of street kids are outside the shelter system and drop-in centers are the most widely used by street kids.  Drop-in centers are organized to provide immediate, instrumental services—food, clothing, shower facilities, laundry facilities and supplies, toiletries, and bus and subway tokens.  These services are to be provided with few if any requirements or obligations; ideally the centers are organized to allow individuals who need services to stop-in at any time and receive those services, and are often the key entry into the formal system of service provision for many youth.  

I conducted a year-long ethnographic study of a drop-in center for street kids, focusing on staff relations with clients.  The most striking feature of these relations was the deep-seated staff concern with preventing and controlling client disruptiveness, which resulted in two significant organizational consequences.  First, staff developed an elaborate intake screening process in order to identify and exclude potentially disruptive clients.  Clients were only admitted after they have provided identification, filled out information sheets, reviewed and signed the rules contract, had an intake interview with a staff person, and were deemed ‘appropriate’ by a staff member.  The result was a deep irony: as the center developed elaborate and more formal intake procedures, it became extremely difficult, if not impossible, for clients to “drop-in” and receive short-term services.

Second, for those admitted to the center, staff followed a therapeutic approach akin to “Tough Love,” imposing a strict regimen of rule enforcement and exclusion intended to control and regulate the behavior and activities of clients.  However, this emphasis on rules and enforcement led to increased tensions with and distance from the clients, often undermining (and contradicting) staff efforts to develop personal or therapeutic relations with clients.  Again, the result was an ironic contradiction of the “gateway” or “first step” tenet of drop-in programs for street youth.  Thus, the staff’s emphasis on control severely restricted the possibilities of street youth using contact with the center to begin transitioning off the street or reintegrating into more stable and conventional forms of life.

While conducting my research, I also explored how and why staff actively utilize the exclusionary practices of withdrawal, non-engagement, and silencing and how these practices, which were meant to be therapeutic and prevent conflict, paradoxically created, sustained, and escalated much of the staff-client conflict within the center.  This forced the staff to rely heavily on expulsion to maintain control.  For a full discussion of this, please see Joniak, Elizabeth A. 2005. “Exclusionary Practices and the Delegitimization of Client Voice: How Staff Create, Sustain, and Escalate Conflict in a Drop-in Center for Street Kids” in American Behavioral Scientist 48:961-988.

Survey Research at M&T Bank

(1995, 1996)

Over the course of two summers (1996, 1995) in my capacity as a credit administration analyst and a portfolio reporting assistant in loan controls, I carried out two large research projects.

The first project was an extensive mail survey concerning banks’ collateral and credit policies and procedures.

The second project was a telephone survey regarding banks’ handling of credit inquiries and check verifications.

For both studies, I was responsible for researching the topic of study, developing the questionnaire and interview protocols, conducting the study, and coding, compiling, and analyzing the data.  This information was then submitted to the Vice President of Loan Controls, Commercial Credit Division.