USC School of Social Work Assistant Professor Eric Rice has received a three-year, $2.1 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study social networking among homeless youth with the goal of creating innovative interventions to combat risky sexual and drug-use behaviors.

Rice, who is the study's principal investigator, along with co-investigator Norweeta Milburn of UCLA's Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and project director Harmony Rhoades, a post-doctoral research associate at the USC School of Social Work, will be looking at two primary epicenters of homelessness in the Los Angeles area – Hollywood and Santa Monica – and sampling large networks of several hundred youth to find out how they are interconnected. Rice wants to understand why some homeless youth engage in street life and why some don't, and use that as a way to understand how to create intervention programs.

"To develop new social media interventions, we have to understand how homeless youth use it," Rice said. "People's relationships are very complicated. Who they're connected to, what they're talking about and what they're exposed to is ongoing and dynamic. We have to look at networks over time to understand how this works. The reason the grant is so big is because of the large number of connections and the dynamic nature of the networks."

Rice conducted a pilot study in 2009 that suggested homeless youth's use of social networking websites could lead to an increase in risky sexual behaviors. However, homeless youth who used these sites were also more likely to have been tested for sexually transmitted infections such as HIV and to be better informed about preventing infections. Rice and his co-investigator, Sean Young of UCLA, were particularly surprised to find that nearly 80 percent of homeless youth they surveyed used online social networking media.

During the course of conducting in-depth qualitative interviews for the pilot study, which was published in the journal AIDS and Behavior in February, Rice found that the homeless youth who maintained connections to home, mostly via social media, fared the best while being homeless.

"Street networks are sources of risk, and home-based networks are sources of resilience. We were told about parents, siblings and best friends from home whom they kept up with via MySpace," Rice said. "What it means to be homeless in the contemporary era is different from ever before."

Rice became interested in homeless youth while working at My Friend's Place, a drop-in center in Hollywood.

"I find troubled youth very compelling because they're not a lost cause," he said. "Most don't suffer from mental health problems, but they do have risky sex and drug behaviors. Their HIV levels are higher; therefore, sexual health interventions are needed for them."

To reach his goals of understanding how homeless youth's relationships lead to sprawling networks, how these networks influence risk-taking behaviors, and how face-to-face street life works versus street life with technology, Rice will work with My Friend's Place and Santa Monica's Common Ground, an HIV community center, to find study participants.

"No one has collected social network data on the homeless before and tracked the connections between the homeless. It will be interesting to see how a couple of relationships become big networks," Rice said.

Rice perseveres in working with homeless youth because he finds the process hopeful.

"If we can understand them better and design programs for them, then they can become housed, productive citizens," he said. "These don't have to be life stories – just war stories."