The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimates that more than 3 million people, 1.35 million of them children, experience homelessness in a given year. In today’s economy, even more people are at risk.
More than ever, it is crucial to understand how to help them. The key is in getting a handle on support systems, says sociology major Iraimi Mercado ’12. For her senior thesis, she spent months researching homelessness, focusing on how services impact the lives of women and children living in emergency shelters. She’s hoping her findings can offer policy makers guidance as they create regulations that impact families.
Her research involved one-on-one interviews with single mothers living at the Old Colony YMCA Family Life Center in Brockton, Mass. She explored which services over what period of time have helped them.
Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary (2nd edition; Wiley, 1997), which has been translated into Swedish, Polish, Farsi and Chinese. His current projects include the editing of a handbook on the psychology of religion for Oxford University Press and the development of what he calls the “Faith Q-Sort,” a device for assessing a wide variety of positions on faith, ranging from indifference or even hostility toward religion or spirituality to strongly favorable attitudes, both conservative and liberal. In addition to being an accomplished professor and author, he has been a sought-after speaker at conferences. Last year alone he traveled abroad three times to address conferences in China, Italy and Denmark. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Lund University in Sweden in 1993, and has been honored in various ways by the American Psychological Association. In May he plans to retire from Wheaton to devote more time to his projects, including consulting with two universities in China to help set up psychology and religion programs there. We talked to him about his most recent research.
