Hemlöshet - en definitionsfråga?

Sammanfattning: The aim of this paper was to elucidate representations of how homelessness and interventions against homelessness is perceived in a Swedish municipality from socialconstructivistic perspective. The questions it aimed to answer were: How is homelessness represented in the municipality by participants of the local housing market and public and non-profit sectors? How can representations of homelessness from the participants be deconstructed and understood? Homelessness has been considered a social problem since the middle of the 18th century. The ways to explain why homelessness exists and how to rectify and define homelessness has been in continuously transformation in different extensions since then. Even so, some of these explanations, definitions and actions has returned or possess similarities across time. The used method of this paper was case study in order to concentrate on the municipality specifically. The analyzed material consisted of qualitative, semistructured interviews with seven participants. Public documents were also reviewed from the social service center in the municipality and reports from the county administrative board to understand the representations in its context. The participants that attended on interviews was one participant from a non-profit- organisation, one from the local housing market and five municipalityworkers. We found that some of the participants had both similarities and discrepancies in their representations but all of the participants had tendency to construct additional categories to deal with homeless persons divergent needs.