Ask the People Who Lived It
Anchored to: the proposed Delphi study involving practitioners, researchers, and people with lived experience of housing instability
Most competency frameworks in this field get built by researchers and practitioners, in a room, without the people who actually lived the crisis those frameworks are meant to address.
A Delphi study, a structured process for building expert consensus, could change that if it deliberately included people with lived experience of housing instability alongside practitioners and researchers. Not as anecdote or color commentary. As co-authors of the actual framework. What competencies do housing-insecure individuals themselves say were most crucial to their own stability? That question hasn’t systematically been asked at the level where it would actually shape curriculum design.
This connects to something Fricker (2007) calls epistemic injustice, the harm done when someone’s lived expertise gets treated as less credible than credentialed expertise, simply because of how it arrived. A framework built without the people who navigated the crisis firsthand risks repeating exactly that harm, no matter how well-intentioned the researchers are.
If your field builds frameworks or standards, who’s actually in the room when they get written?
Author: Sandra Roussel
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