User:Brynnmarie28/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Homeless women in the United States

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have chosen to evaluate this article for a class assignment in relation to personal work I am conducting in the field of Homeless women in the United States and Trauma Informed Care.

Evaluate the article
The lead section for the article is a somewhat neutral introduction to the topic. The introduction does a good job of summarizing the rest of the article in a concise way. The introductory sentence does not define the topic as a whole, but rather states a statistic about the rate at which this demographic is growing in the US population.

The content of the article is relevant, but its neutrality is speculated in the talk page. Different socioeconomic and healthcare aspects are discussed in relation to the subject such as healthcare and domestic violence, and veterans and the decline of the welfare state. However, the information used to reference the discourse in the article is outdated and needs updating. Most references are from 2013-15 and may not currently reflect the nature of these intertwined aspects of female homelessness in the US today. What also could be included, is the way "welfare mothers" were incriminated with the Federal Welfare Laws and Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act and how this led to increasing rates of homelessness in single mothers. The information in this section on the decline of the welfare state also places heavy emphasis on families and single mothers - under-representing minority women, single women and undocumented women experiencing this crisis of decline in social welfare.

The tone of the article is overall neutral but the balance is as described above. There is a heavy emphasis on veteran homelessness in the United States; however, this demographic makes up a small portion of the female homeless population in the United states. The subheadings under the section for veterans also incorporates information about HUD and domestic violence, which would potentially fit better in the section above it that explicitly discusses domestic violence and its effects on this demographic.

There are a large number of quality sources used as references in this article; however, most of them are outdated with some of the most recent only dating back to 2015.

The article is organized poorly, with the subject of domestic violence being a major heading but also dispersed throughout other parts of the article as subheadings. There seems to be no transition between discourses; however, they are effectively prefaced by the introductory paragraph.

The images and media provided in this article are perhaps one of the most problematic parts of this article. They portray suffering in an objective manner, and do not accurately represent the reality of all the types of homelessness that the female population experiences in the United States. They portray the women as isolated drifters, which more accurately represents male homelessness in the United States. This is also resembles the discourse on Veteran Homelessness in this article.The talk page seems to be most recently incorporating edits from students participating in course assignments. The neutrality dispute is the most applicable dispute; however it dates back to 2012.

Overall, I would argue that this article is extremely outdated and serves to perpetuate old narratives about female homelessness. The neutrality dispute appears to be one of misrepresentation and underrepresentation rather than bias, but that is my personal opinion. I would recommend a complete revision or rewrite of this article with updated subheadings, new media, and more information on modern discourse and demographic subpopulations such as minority and undocumented women. Interpersonal discourse between homeless women would also be relevant to include to accurately represent the reality of homeless women in the 21st century.