Overlaps in Dimensions of Poverty

By J. Bradshaw, N. Finch. Journal of Social Policy, 2003

367 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed. We have attempted to analyse overlap in two ways. First, by exploring the dimensions of poverty cumulatively, we have found that, the more dimensions people are poor on, the more they are unlike the non-poor and the poor on only one dimension, in their characteristics and in their social exclusion. Second, by treating particular dimensions as meriting more attention than others, we explored three permutations of this type and concluded that, while each permutation were more unlike the non-poor than those poor on a single dimension, they were not as unlike the non-poor as the cumulatively poor were. These results indicate that accumulation might be a better way of using overlapping measures of poverty than by giving priority to one dimension over another. The implication of the paper is that it is not safe to rely on one measure of poverty – the results obtained are just not reliable enough. Surveys, such as the Family Resources Survey or the European Community Household Panel, which are used to monitor the prevalence of poverty, need to be adapted to enable results to be triangulated – to incorporate a wider range of poverty measures.

Subfields: Finance, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63fc8d916acdc5a84603e9430ce902eec610642b

How researchers see this paper

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In Finance

1. Anne-Catherine Guio
2. Eric Marlier
3. C. Whelan
4. Gill Main
5. B. Nolan
6. R. Hick
7. Björn Halleröd
8. B. Maître

In Health

1. Anne-Catherine Guio
2. Eric Marlier
3. Gill Main
4. C. Whelan
5. R. Hick
6. Björn Halleröd
7. J. Bradshaw

In Sociology and Political Science

1. C. Whelan
2. B. Nolan
3. B. Maître
4. Anne-Catherine Guio
5. Eric Marlier
6. J. Bradshaw
7. Gill Main
8. R. Hick

Citations in the corpus

• Poverty, welfare problems and Social exclusion (2008, background): “Recently, Bradshaw and Finch (2003) examined the degree to which three different measures of poverty were related to different”
• The Capability Approach: Insights for a New Poverty Focus (2011, background): “And while he discusses such conversion factors primarily in theoretical terms, the mismatch between indirect and direct measures of poverty has been one of the primary empirical findings from poverty analysis in the field of social policy in recent decades (see, inter alia, Gordon et al. 2000; Brads”
• Welfare regime and social class variation in poverty and economic vulnerability in Europe: an analysis of EU-SILC (2009, background): “As knowledge of the limitations of relying solely on income to measure poverty and social exclusion has become more widespread, attention has been increasingly focused on multi-dimensional approaches (Bradshaw and Finch, 2003, Halleröd, 1995, Gordon et al, 2000, Kangas and Ritakallio,1998, Whelan et”
• Income poverty and material hardship: How strong is the association? (2007, background): “Material hardship is only moderately correlated with income and poverty in the U.S. (Mayer and Jencks, 1989, 1993; Mayer, 1995; Rector et al., 1999; Beverly, 2000; Boushey et al., 2001; Perry, 2002; Bradshaw and Finch, 2003).”
• A Child Material Deprivation Index (2012, methodology): “Bradshaw and Finch (2003) called this ‘overlaps analysis’ and in work for the EU Bradshaw and Mayhew (2010) argued it was a more reliable measure of poverty than income or deprivation alone.”
• Measuring living standards with income and consumption: evidence from the UK (2012, background): “12 For example, Bradshaw and Finch (2003) showed, using UK”
• Using Non-Monetary Deprivation Indicators to Analyze Poverty and Social Exclusion: Lessons from Europe?. (2010, background): “Bradshaw and Finch (2003) have looked at those reporting not only low income and deprivation but also a”
• Child removal as the gateway to further adversity: Birth mother accounts of the immediate and enduring collateral consequences of child removal (2020, background): “As Bradshaw and Finch (2003) have described, disadvantage tends to cluster – for this group of women, child removal was firmly the gateway to further adversities.”
• Improving the measurement of material deprivation at the European Union level (2016, background): “It would be expected from Townsend’s theory of relative deprivation and Mack and Lansley’s concept of ‘consensual poverty’ that someone who is ‘deprived’ would also be more likely to consider themselves to be subjectively poor (Bradshaw and Finch, 2003).”