Transforming the lives of the homeless

Universidade de São Paulo researcher monitors the homeless for five years to study processes of interaction that stimulate resilience.

By Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – For five years, psychologist Aparecida Magali de Souza Alvarez closely monitored a group of homeless people in the city of São Paulo and the people who aided them. The study, conducted using a multidisciplinary approach, had the objective of understanding the processes of interaction that foster human transformation in a social setting marked by prejudice, violence and contempt.

The study was the basis of Alvarez’s doctoral thesis, conducted with a FAPESP fellowship and defended in 2003 at the Universidade de São Paulo’s (USP) Public Health School. The results of the study are described in the book Transformações Humanas: Encontros, Amor Ágape e Resiliência (Human Transformations: Encounters, Agape Love and Resilience).

The investigative process utilized in the study included techniques such as observation, interviews, photos, recordings, and primarily, interaction. According to Alvarez, the study was not conducted within a traditional scientific framework in which the researcher does not become involved with the subject of the study.

“In order to understand the transformative relationships that occur, I could not restrict myself solely to questionnaires. I needed to create a deeper process of interaction. Although I worked with broadly used indices and statistics in the world of public health, the study concentrated on the stories of real lives. The book reflects my own intense interaction with homeless people,” Alvarez explains in an interview with Agência FAPESP.

These life stories and the relationships the researcher developed with homeless people are analyzed based on concepts developed by several authors. Some of these concepts, such as “resilience,” were central to defining the theoretical framework, according to the author. “Resilience is the ability to face adversity in life, overcome it and come out stronger or transformed by it,” she explains.

Alvarez has studied the concept of resilience since 1993, when she worked at FSP-USP’s Human Development and Growth Studies Center (CDH) and had her first contact with homeless people. In 1999, she began her master’s degree – also with a FAPESP fellowship – on resilience in the context of the homeless population.

The methodological option to prioritize experiences and interaction as a strategy is explained, according to Alvarez, by the characteristics of the population studied. She suggests that homeless people are largely misunderstood by society, which does not know their life stories.

“Even for those interested in establishing contact with these people, it is not something trivial. They are people that have suffered and no longer trust in the world. When we pursue contact, they close themselves off in an attempt to preserve what little dignity they still have. The study showed that it is possible to help them start over, based on a special type of interaction that I call ‘transformative encounters’,” Alvarez says.

The assumption of her thesis, according to Alvarez, is that only transformative encounters are capable of affording homeless people resilience. With the theoretical and conceptual fabric developed by the author, this type of encounter has the characteristics of agape love.

“Agape is a type of love that fully accepts the other, regardless of who he or she is or what he or she has done. It is way of accepting the other simply because they are human. Agape love is capable of forgiving and giving selflessly without expecting anything in return. Transformative encounters have at their core the characteristic of an agape action,” she explains.

Alvarez also notes that in her experience with homeless people, she realized that this love relationship was present in encounters that led to human transformation.

During her post-doctorate in France, funded by FAPESP, Alvarez developed an operational methodological instrument to foster the human transformation observed in her research. “I observed the transformation of people and thought about a strategy to develop this type of action in a structured situation,” she adds.