All time references are in CEST
Poverty – A Maze of Measurement |
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| Session Organisers | Dr Claudia Karwath (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) Dr Christoph Homuth (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) Dr Monja Schmitt (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) |
| Time | Tuesday 18 July, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Room | |
Poverty is omnipresent and affects all age groups, from infants to the elderly. At the same time, however, there are several definitions of poverty. Poverty has several dimensions, including material situation, health and safety, education, family and environment (e.g. neighbourhood), behaviour and risks, subjective well-being, as well as general living conditions and available resources.
While the concept of poverty has mostly been defined primarily in terms of disposable income, some researchers also use alternative concepts of poverty (e.g., Amarya Sen's Capability Approach) to measure the effects of poverty. At the same time, however, it is argued that only the measurement of poverty based on income is relevant, as everything - including the subjective assessment of one's own living situation - is related to the amount of money available.
Due to the different conceptualizations of poverty, we would like to invite to this session to discuss poverty in general, the different operationalizations of poverty and results of different measurements of poverty in administrative and survey data. The session is intended to serve as an exchange on the topic, the understanding and measurement of poverty and to show the different ways of defining and analysing poverty. We are therefore looking forward to contributions that help to understand the concept of poverty comprehensively and enable an exchange between different understandings of poverty.
Keywords: poverty, income, measurement, definition
Dr Anika Schenck-Fontaine (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) - Presenting Author
Dr Jessica Jones (National Center for Health Statistics (CDC))
Researchers traditionally use low household income to measure economic hardship. However, this practice obfuscates the independent role of material hardship in children’s development. Research using data from countries around the world consistently finds that material hardship is equally or more harmful for children than low income. Within the US, the characteristics, experiences, and outcomes of children who experience material hardship, but are not low-income are not well understood; even less is known about how these children and families fare when additional economic stressors strike.
We use the National Survey of Children’s Health Longitudinal Cohort (NSCH-LC) to investigate the characteristics and outcomes of children and families who experience material hardship. The NSCH-LC is a probability-based, nationally representative study designed to assess the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children throughout the US. Data were collected pre- and post-pandemic (2018/19 and 2024) on over 20,000 children. This large sample allows us to examine four groups of children and families based on the intersection of material hardship and household income to explore the role of material hardship both in conjunction with, and separate from, income poverty.
We answer three research questions: (1) What are the characteristics of children and families in each group? (2) What are the impacts of economic shocks (i.e., job loss or significant income loss) during the pandemic on family economic wellbeing in each group? (3) What are the impacts of economic shocks on children’s externalizing and internalizing behavior within each group? These results will add nuance to our understanding of the multidimensional nature of economic hardship among families with children in the US. These findings will also have important implications for improving traditionally means-tested protective policies during times of economic and other crises.
Mr Baqir Khawari (Master's Student) - Presenting Author
This study has been undertaken to investigate the impact of remittances on household poverty and inequality using OLS and Logit Models with a strictly multi-random sampling method ith a sample size of 1,060 households. The result of OLS model reveals that if the per capita international remittances increase by 1%, then it is estimated that the per capita income will increase by 0.071% and 0.059% during 2019/20 and 2020/21 respectively. In addition, a 1% increase in external remittances results in a 0.0272% and 0.025% reduction in per capita depth of poverty and 0.0149% and 0.0145% decrease in severity of poverty during 2019/20 and 2020/21 respectively. It is also shown that the effect of external remittances on poverty is greater than internal remittances. In terms of inequality, the result represents that remittances reduce Gini coefficient by 2% and 7% during 2019/20 and 2020/21 respectively. Further, it is bold that COVID-19 negatively impact on the amount of received remittances by households thus resulted in reduction on the size of the effect of remittances. Therefore, A concerted effort of effective policies and governance, and international assistance are imperative to address this prolonged problem.
Dr Joanna Syrda (University of Bath) - Presenting Author
There is a frequently overlooked by research yet long-understood ‘mischievous ambiguity of the word “poor”’ - a phrase referring to the idea that poverty is defined differently by different people. The idea that ideology influences knowledge and perceptions of causality has historically been a central concern for epistemologists and attribution theorists. Established scholarly tradition defines political ideology as an amalgam of values, beliefs, and attitudes, which in turn frames information processing and preferences for organizing society. It is, therefore, unsurprising that individuals with differing political ideologies advocate divergent solutions to poverty. What remains of great academic and policy interest, particularly amid increasing political polarization, is understanding when individuals start to diverge in their problem-solving processes. There are many mental models and problem-solving methods, yet they all typically start with definitions. This is the first study to explore if and how poverty definitions depend on individual political ideologies.
Using a representative 2022 sample of British citizens (N=2,642) I demonstrate that individuals who are right-wing, authoritarian, and unsympathetic (low on welfarism scale), are less likely to define a given set of circumstances as poverty. This is partially mediated by personal poverty experience. Furthermore, political ideologies are associated with assessments of the current poverty situation in the UK, as well as past and future poverty trends. Specifically, individuals with right-wing and low-welfarist orientations are significantly more likely to observe that there is very little real poverty in Britain, that poverty has been decreasing over the past decade, and that it will continue to decrease over the next decade. These effects are partially mediated by poverty definitions. Finally, both the association between political ideology and poverty definitions, and the association between political ideology and broader poverty assessments, are moderated by political interest, party closeness, and party support.
Mr Richard Heuberger (Statistics Austria) - Presenting Author
In this work, I present an indicator that deals with the connection between poverty and employment that makes gender differences visible (Knittler/Heuberger, 2018). Previous approaches, such as the In-work at-risk-of-poverty rate calculated by EUROSTAT, are based on the equivalized household income for people in employment and therefore only allow very limited analyses based on individual characteristics; this results in gender differences becoming nearly invisible for multi-person-households. An essential indicator for the discussion in the context of poverty and employment is therefore conceptually unable to take social inequalities other than those on the household level into account. Our approach combines the advantages of a household perspective with those of an individual perspective and remedies this analytical deficiency.
In contrast to the conventional method, the alternative approach focuses on the individual income of the persons in work, while the household context is recorded using the poverty risk threshold. The individualisation of the income calculation serves to avoid the "implicit equal distribution" of income in the equivalization of household income and to estimate the risk of poverty at the individual level for employed persons.
The presentation contextualises the concept. A key part of this is the comparative analysis with the Eurostat definition. Since key elements of the new calculation approach are comparable with the Eurostat definition, differences arise only from the differences of their concept and their different abilities to make social inequality visible. A analysis then allows an answer to the question of how many employed people are dependent on additional income in the household in order not to be at risk of poverty. A discussion of the advantages as well as of the disadvantages of this proposed approach, together with an outlook on possible further developments of this approach completes the presentation.