Understanding The Nature of Homlessness

I knew that I would encounter homelessness when I came to Berkeley.   I
was expecting it, because just about everybody I knew had something to say about
the rumors they'd heard filter over from the West Coast.   Coming from New York,
however, I figured I'd seen it all, and would be in control over whatever I
would be up against.   Reality quickly hit me, though, as I began to familiarize
myself with Berkeley and its main streets.   I'd never seen anything quite like
Telegraph Avenue and People's Park.   No matter how much poverty one has seen
throughout the course of their lives, it's far more difficult to accept when it
occurs in areas of high concentration.
Understanding the nature of homeless people asking for money and their
interactions with people walking up and down a main street such as Telegraph
Avenue is a difficult task.   This observation process, which took place on
Telegraph Avenue watching the homeless at "work", was difficult because of the
wealth of information one could find in simply watching as one person asked
another for money.   We looked for a number of signals in the interactions,
considering people's ages, how they reacted physically, whether or not they
communicated verbally, their demeanor throughout the interaction, and the
importance of eye-contact. We must also wrestle with the ambiguity of the power
structure within the situation, because it is not nearly as clear as it seems.
In the end, we will try to decipher the true nature of these confrontations,
concluding by comparing the analysis of these situations to those found in the
works of Erving Goffman and Robin Leidner.