Poverty – A Maze of Measurement |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Claudia Karwath (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Christoph Homuth (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) |
| Coordinator 3 | Dr Monja Schmitt (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) |
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.