Street children and teenagers have been studied in a systematic way since the seventies. The first studies tried to quantify this population, and afterwards in order to know them better, typologies appeared based on the period they spend in the streets, or both the period in the street and their family relationship. In order to offer a classification procedure, as well as a typology, this research applied cluster analysis on two groups. The first one is composed by almost all downtown street children and teenagers of a city in the state of São Paulo, with 67 children and teenagers in total, and the second a sample of 31 children and teenagers from two neighborhoods of the same city all from the street. For the first group 12 criteria were chosen and for the second group, 7, which resulted in 3 different clusters. These results were also compared with the street children's census carried out four years ago. The results showed that this type of analysis is useful for children's classification, and besides that will subsidize a better planning and public political actions for this section.
Street children; typology; drug use; cluster analysis
