Using And Interpreting Statistical Information

This afternoon we have been looking at statistics within photography. It can become a huge part of careers as surveys and data can be involved quite a lot. As our project is called 'The Others' we have a huge opportunity to research statistics within the subject we're choosing to work with. At this point of time I'm planning to do a project based on the homeless and the way people look at them differently to other people. To find some statistics and data on this I google search 'homeless statistics'. To my surprise there was actually quite a large amount of data examples. I chose this first chart below from the government website as I know that the information will definitely correct and accurate as helping the homeless or housing them all goes through them in the long run.

Page 4 -https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/486671/2015_Q3_Statutory_Homelessness.pdf

In this piece I found out some quite interesting information as the line on the chart was no way near fluent. The number of homeless people accepted by the authorities (into housing) is a lot more than I personally thought. One thing which did surprise me was the difference between today and the early 2000's. I thought that it would have gotten better over the years as the authorities and government give us the impression that everything is being improved and getting better. In 2003/2004 the amount of households accepted by the local authorities as owed a main duty each quarter was around 35'000 which was much higher than it is today at around 15'000. That has dropped by over half. I'm going to presume the reasoning for this is that the number of homeless is going down but I don't know that for sure. I'm going to explore this further below. I took the chart below from poverty.org (link below)

http://www.poverty.org.uk/81/index.shtml

I wanted to find out a bit more about why the number of people accepted by authorities for housing has gone down over the years. I presumed it was down to a lower number of homeless people, my findings were very interesting. I found out that what I thought was true. From 2000 to 2010 the number of household declared homeless has dropped by roughly 100,000. If you think about the number of people in each household, thats still a lot of people but its a lot better than when it was at its highest of just over 200,000. This chart also shows how many of the households have and haven't got children who are dependent on them. The amount of households without dependent children has dropped to roughly the same amount as the ones with.

When researching this subject within statistics I found some very interesting statistics from a survey created by mungos. The results are below

• 73% of clients are male

• 27% of clients are female

• 64% of clients had issues with substance use (drugs and/or alcohol)

• 67% had a physical health condition (medical condition, vision or hearing impaired and/or required regular medication)

• 60% of clients had mental health issues (diagnosed, suspected, depression and/or self harming)

• One third of our clients don't have the necessary literacy skills to complete a form without help

• 9% had been in care

• 45% of clients were ex-offenders or had been in prison

• http://www.mungos.org/homelessness/facts/homelessness_statistics

I found some of these results hard to believe and some of them a lot more believable. The fact that there are more homeless males looking for housing that women quite believable as women often get help from the government services (especially if they have children or are pregnant.) I found the fact that a lot have health issues and mental problems very sad as it isn't neccesarily their fault.

As I have shown in this written piece, data and survey become very helpful and eye opening when researching as it can grasp pieces which you might miss when doing normal research.