Date: Friday, January 30, 2026
Hello! I’m Karla Ganley, a 5th year MD-PhD student specializing in medical anthropology. I’m the Executive Director of the University of Florida’s Homeless Outreach & Street Medicine Program. In this post, I challenge the notion that evaluation is neutral. I argue for greater use of qualitative methods to capture complexity and encourage reflexivity when conducting evaluations. To illustrate, I’ll share my experiences reporting homelessness data to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Eight years ago, I obtained a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree. My coursework for that degree included mostly statistics and epidemiology. My first work experience involved analyzing Medicaid datasets and performing ArcGIS mapping. Over time, I encountered some limits of quantitative data and became intrigued by the complexity of phenomena captured through qualitative methods. I was also drawn to the stronger culture of reflexivity among qualitative researchers.
Both quantitative and qualitative methods carry bias and neither produces “superior” results. All metrics are cultural and political tools that shape knowledge and power. The value of greater inclusion of qualitative methods in policy evaluation is that qualitative methods often reach more comprehensive and nuanced answers. Qualitative methods also tend to encourage evaluators to be more critical and reflexive about what metrics reveal and obscure. I now consider myself a mixed-methods researcher, with a partiality towards qualitative evaluation.
For the past two years, I have participated as a key stakeholder in the planning and implementation of HUD’s annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness (PEUH) for the FL-508 Gainesville/Alachua, Putnam Counties Continuum of Care (CoC). PIT data are counts of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. HUD requires CoCs to plan and carry out these counts locally on an annual basis. Data gets reported to Congress as part of the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) and is used by federal departments to “understand the nature and extent of homelessness.”
For the FL-508 CoC, the number of PEUH decreased 36 percent from 2023 to 2024. This appears to be a success. Anecdotally, from working in the field (in literal encampments and on street corners) as a medical student to provide medical care to PEUH, I can attest that numbers of PEUH have increased. So why are the official numbers reported to HUD decreasing? Because the groundwork of data gathering – the slow, bottom-up, hands-on process of collecting data that qualitative work does better – is missing. Qualitative methods tend to better capture depth and contextual detail, including possible explanations for seemingly suspect or counterintuitive quantitative results. If you look at the unsheltered homelessness survey, it contains questions that produce exclusively quantitative data: where did you sleep last night (vehicle, outside, streets, jail/hospital, or other)? How long have you been homeless this time (first time homeless, less than 4 times, or 4 or more times)?
These questions seek to understand homelessness at a cursory level, and, in my opinion, are part of a larger political strategy to decrease the visibility of PEUH. From my own informal interviews and ethnographic observations of patients/interlocuters, the total number of PEUH hasn’t decreased; these individuals are just becoming harder to find. PEUH are more mobile and moving deeper into the woods because of increased police sweeps and erosion of trust towards community members due to increasingly hostile anti-homelessness policies. In sum, I advocate for greater inclusion of qualitative methods within evaluation to more thoroughly understand complex phenomena and illuminate what quantitative metrics alone may obscure.
Here are some rad resources to help those working in government evaluation incorporate qualitative methods into their work:
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