Informed Consent: Information Production and Ideology

How many Americans are homeless? Although taking a census may sound simple, ensuring an accurate count is the least of its problems. Census takers in all walks of life exercise great care in determining what information is to be collected, how it is to be recorded, and how the findings are ultimately to be presented.

But who decides which evaluation frameworks and indicators are to be used? Do all concerned-census takers and respondents view those indicators in the same manner? Do institutional and social imperatives outweigh individual bias and perspective? And if so, is that really what we want?

Informed Consent analyzes the interplay between ideology and information. Through extensive research on how information about the homeless is generated and interpreted, Lisa Schiff offers both hard evidence and a convincing argument for questioning "how service providers create forms and clients complete them, how advocates administer surveys and public agencies compile counts." At the same time, she explores the day-to-day implications of her findings by demonstrating how competing understandings affect prevailing ideologies, which in turn affect our attempts at social change.