The Culture of Couch Surfing Amongst Students

<p>This thesis explores ‘couch surfing’ as it becomes more prevalent within the tertiary student experience. In recent years, there has been a significant decline in the availability of housing in all major cities in New Zealand. Rental accommodations been particularly hard hit with the number of properties available for occupation under increasing demand. Despite this shortage universities have continued to expand, offering an increased number of positions to students. This dichotomy has impacted university students looking for ‘affordable accommodation.’ This has led to a recent surge in students undertaking studies without fixed abodes for either short time periods or in some cases for the duration of the university trimesters or year, commonly referred to as ‘student homelessness.’ The students are faced with a new reality; a reality of relying on short term peer support for accommodation, known as couch-surfing. This research considers the impact of accommodation uncertainty within the tertiary student experience and specifically asks what impact the current global phenomenon of couch surfing is having on either alleviation or amplification of the physical and/or emotional stresses and strains associated with attending university. This study interviews students who have experienced uncertainty around their accommodation arrangements and as a result have engaged in couch surfing practices. The aim of this study is to gain a holistic overview of the impact this experience of uncertainty and temporary accommodation has on a student’s life and uses photography as a tool within human-centred and participatory design approaches to assist in the expression and interpretation of the couch surfing experience during university study. At the outset, more portrait photography approaches such as model headshots are used to illustrate the student couch surfer and their accommodation experience and surroundings with the purpose of capturing the couch surfers in the moment in mind. Following on from this the study introduces the ethnographic method of Photovoice and asks the couch surfing student to record their own accommodation experience through the taking of more self-focused photos that include their surroundings and expressions of the experience. As a final experience, a workshop was designed and facilitated to synergise the student voice on the experiences of couch surfing. This experience was also documented through photography. The culmination of these research approaches is a visual output in the form of a photobook that will showcase the overall narrative of the thesis. The main objective of the thesis and visual output is to explore the lifestyle and experiences of student couch surfers and to visually amplify a collective student voice that speaks to the emergent and unique phenomenon of couch surfing, that has had an impact on their university experience.</p>

The Culture of Couch Surfing Amongst Students

<p>This thesis explores ‘couch surfing’ as it becomes more prevalent within the tertiary student experience. In recent years, there has been a significant decline in the availability of housing in all major cities in New Zealand. Rental accommodations been particularly hard hit with the number of properties available for occupation under increasing demand. Despite this shortage universities have continued to expand, offering an increased number of positions to students. This dichotomy has impacted university students looking for ‘affordable accommodation.’ This has led to a recent surge in students undertaking studies without fixed abodes for either short time periods or in some cases for the duration of the university trimesters or year, commonly referred to as ‘student homelessness.’ The students are faced with a new reality; a reality of relying on short term peer support for accommodation, known as couch-surfing. This research considers the impact of accommodation uncertainty within the tertiary student experience and specifically asks what impact the current global phenomenon of couch surfing is having on either alleviation or amplification of the physical and/or emotional stresses and strains associated with attending university. This study interviews students who have experienced uncertainty around their accommodation arrangements and as a result have engaged in couch surfing practices. The aim of this study is to gain a holistic overview of the impact this experience of uncertainty and temporary accommodation has on a student’s life and uses photography as a tool within human-centred and participatory design approaches to assist in the expression and interpretation of the couch surfing experience during university study. At the outset, more portrait photography approaches such as model headshots are used to illustrate the student couch surfer and their accommodation experience and surroundings with the purpose of capturing the couch surfers in the moment in mind. Following on from this the study introduces the ethnographic method of Photovoice and asks the couch surfing student to record their own accommodation experience through the taking of more self-focused photos that include their surroundings and expressions of the experience. As a final experience, a workshop was designed and facilitated to synergise the student voice on the experiences of couch surfing. This experience was also documented through photography. The culmination of these research approaches is a visual output in the form of a photobook that will showcase the overall narrative of the thesis. The main objective of the thesis and visual output is to explore the lifestyle and experiences of student couch surfers and to visually amplify a collective student voice that speaks to the emergent and unique phenomenon of couch surfing, that has had an impact on their university experience.</p>

Diversité des composés en couch, de leurs équivalents et de leurs commentaires

The aim of this article is to study the diversity of the forms taken by compounds in which the loan couch appears in French and Polish, taking into account the diversity of their equivalents and the comments made about them. Two loans are particularly well represented: couch surfing and couch potato and two others, couch gag and couch promotion, both less frequent and less widespread. A large number of other cases are found in the corpus which also include couch, many of which are hapaxes. Analysis of the results in both languages but more particularly in French reveals that the more frequent the loanword is, the greater the variety of both native equivalents proposed and comments on both the loan and the appropriate translation.

Sharing Economy: Business Models and Regulatory Landscape in the Mediterranean Areas

The paper describes the state of the art of the sharing economy in an ecosystemic perspective including a discussion about the strengths and weakness of business models (apartment/house renting, couch-surfing, car sharing and ride sharing, co-working, reselling and trading) and regulatory and legal issues in some European countries such as: Italy, Spain Croatia and Slovenia. The work was carried out within “open DOORS”, a project was co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.

Highlighted & Underlined

Girls are much better than boys at working together to solve problems, according to an international assessment of collaborative problem solving. More than 4% of adolescents and 10% of young adults nationwide were living on the street, in cars, shelters, or couch-surfing at some point in the last year. Most high schools have assisted a victim of teen dating violence in the past two years, although most schools still do not have a protocol for how to respond to a report of such an encounter. Supports are available for talking with your community about the value of early learning. Poor parents are dramatically less likely to have attended a school or class event than nonpoor parents and far less likely to have volunteered at their child’s school, but they are just as likely as nonpoor parents to attend parent-teacher conferences.

Homelessness among clients of Sydney’s supervised injecting facility

Purpose The Uniting Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) opened in Sydney, Australia, in May 2001. Homelessness among people who inject drugs (PWID) in Australia has been increasing, and establishing how supervised injecting facilities (SIFs) might best support clients into housing is an important goal. The purpose of this paper is to update knowledge regarding the accommodation status of MSIC clients, thereby supporting a better understanding of the complex needs of these clients. Design/methodology/approach Client accommodation status at MSIC registration (first visit) and in a brief survey (conducted in May 2016) were compared; unstable accommodation was defined as rough sleeping, couch surfing, hostel, boarding house or crisis accommodation. The bivariate logistic regression analysis was used to explore the association between socio-demographics and accommodation status at both time points; a paired t-test was used to compare the visit records for those who reported stable and unstable accommodation in May 2016. Findings Of 232 clients who were present at MSIC during the week the Brief Survey was conducted, 107 participated. Most were male (79 per cent) with a mean age of 41.4 years. A total of 64 (60 per cent) identified as living in unstable accommodation; having increased from 40 per cent at the time of registration (first visit). There were significant positive associations between unstable accommodation status and unemployment, imprisonment and history of overdose, all measured at registration. In May 2016, unstable accommodation status was significantly associated with age of first injection and with unemployment status (as measured at registration); those living in unstable accommodation in May 2016 had a lower number of visits, a lower number of referrals to health and social services and a lower number of overdoses at MSIC than those living in a stable accommodation. Originality/value The rates of unstable accommodation among MSIC clients have been increasing. These findings highlight the importance of SIFs and drug consumption rooms as venue to address the essential needs of PWID, such as housing. The window of opportunity to support PWID who experience housing instability seems to be narrower than for those who live in stable accommodation.

Developing an Estimate of Supported Housing Needs for Persons with Serious Mental Illnesses

A rich body of literature attests to the importance of affordable accommodation and support services necessary, appropriate, and acceptable to persons disabled by a mental illness. However, there is a little which provides a means for housing and service planners to determine the gap between available supportive housing and need. Such understandings are needed to prepare strategies and develop the resources needed to accommodate persons with a disabling mental illness in the community. While housing studies that examine shelter needs of the homeless acknowledge that a sizable proportion has a disabling mental illness, these numbers underestimate need in the cohort that experiences disabling mental illnesses. This underestimate exists because many of those who are disabled by mental illness and in need of supportive housing are among the hidden homeless: doubled-up, couch-surfing, and temporarily sheltered by friends and family. Thus, little is known about the size of this cohort or their supportive shelter needs. The present analysis examines two approaches and offers one methodology as most feasible and parsimonious which can approximate housing need and may be extrapolated to other urban locations.