Are There Different Types of Homeless Families? A Typology of Homeless Families Based On Cluster Analysis* Evangeline R. Danseco and E. Wayne Holden** Cluster analysis was conducted using data from 180 families and 348 children participating in a comprehensive health care program for children in homeless families. Three empirically derived groups of homeless families were identified, with clusters primarily differentiated on previous history of homelessness, parenting stress, and major life stressors. One group displayed higher rates of parenting stress and major life concerns. Children in this group consistently exhibited greater behavior problems, compared with children in the other clusters, and showed a trend suggesting poorer cognitive, academic, and adaptive behavior outcomes. Children in the cluster of homeless families whose parents reported low parenting stress and low major life concerns exhibited better outcomes. Results are discussed within the context of developing more sophisticated multivariate models for specifying the effects of variations in homelessness and poverty in general on children and families. Key Words: child development, homelessness, parenting, poverty, resilience. Research on the effects of homelessness on children's educational, developmental. and mental health status has yielded inconsistent results. While some investigations have reported serious detrimental effects among the majority of children in homeless families (e.g., Bassuk & Rosenberg, 1990; Zima, Wells, & Freeman, 1994), others have reported more conservative estimates consistent with outcomes typically reported for children in impoverished, housed families (e.g., Masten, Miliotis, Graham-Berman, Ramirez, & Neeman, 1993; Rescorla, Parker, & Stolley, 1991). In a recent review of studies on the mental health of homeless children, Holden, Horton, and Danseco (1995) noted that such inconsistencies reflect conceptual and methodological limitations of research in this area. Recommendations were made for avoiding specific methodological pitfalls and utilizing existing frameworks in developmental psychopathology as conceptual bases for guiding research in this area. The lack of conceptual frameworks to guide research efforts in this area is one of the more serious limitations hindering our understanding of the effects of homelessness on children. Homelessness is often assumed to be a unitary phenomenon, with research methodologies and data analyses attempting to examine the main effects of homelessness on children's functioning. While this approach presents information that can be critical in highlighting the plight of homeless children, compared with poor but housed children, this approach does not assist in identifying aspects of family homelessness that may differentially affect children's mental health status. This paper presents an exploratory analysis to identify different types of homeless families through an empirical method and, second, to examine variations in children's outcomes among these types of homeless families. The development of a typology for homeless families aids our understanding of the mechanisms by which homelessness affects children in response to calls for research to focus on the processes by which poverty and other risk factors affect children (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1993; Garmezy, 1993; Huston, McLoyd, & Garcia Coll, 1994; Rutter, 1993). Moreover, obtaining empirically-derived categories of homeless families can verify descriptions of various types of homeless families often advanced in the literature. For example, the Institute of Medicine report (1988) described three patterns of homeless families based solely on descriptions of service providers and review of the literature. Similarly, Koegel and Burnam (1987) presented profiles of traditional and nontraditional homeless alcoholic adults. These types of homeless families were not empirically driven nor subjected to further analysis. …