Changing How Libraries Respond to Patrons Experiencing Homelessness in Crisis: How Library Social Workers are Perceived to Reduce Reliance on Law Enforcement

Abstract

While early research on library social work has described the broad role of social workers and included some aspects of crisis response, no study has given an in-depth explanation of how social workers are changing libraries’ response to crisis with patrons experiencing homelessness. This embedded multiple-case study across three U.S. urban libraries includes the perspectives of 107 unique participants across six broad roles – patrons experiencing homelessness, library police/security, front-facing staff, social workers, branch managers and chief executive officers. With 46 in-depth Zoom interviews and 91 Qualtrics surveys, this study provides extensive qualitative support that library social workers are perceived to reduce libraries’ reliance on law enforcement to handle crises with patrons experiencing homelessness. Three key themes of how social workers influenced libraries’ responses were found: being an option, running interference and buffering. In addition, a comingled rival was identified: the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.