This project examined how families from across the income distribution went about negotiating and sharing their resources. The things we did included:
- Designing a mixed-methods research process that brought together in-depth qualitative data with robust survey data
- Developing and testing approaches to having conversations with children, parents and families about how they acquire and use resources
- Developing and testing survey questions based on the things that families identified as important
- Conducting a longitudinal survey in partnership with a survey agency; designing the sample and ensuring that data were robust
- Analysing qualitative and quantitative data and developing and testing theories based on this data
- Producing reports and outputs for a diverse range of audiences and presenting these at policy and practice events
Lots of policies and interventions to address poverty focus on training families in things like financial management, parenting skills, and raising aspirations. The assumption behind this is that there is something that families in poverty are doing something different to better off families, which is causing their poverty. In reality, there’s very little research into how families behave in terms of negotiating about and sharing their resources. That’s a problem because for anti-poverty policies to be effective and sustainable, they need to target the real causes of poverty.
Our approach
We developed a new approach to understanding how families across the income distribution go about getting, talking about, and sharing their resources.
We did this using ethnographic methods – meaning that we spent a lot of time with eight families in Leeds and York, getting to know them really well and understand their perspectives and experiences of family resources.
Alongside this, we did three waves of a survey, gathering data from 1000 parent-child pairs, to see how our learning from the ethnographic strand of the research compared to experiences among a larger group of people.
Throughout the research, we kept considering the things we were learning from both the ethnographic research and the survey, and checking how the different types of data might compare to give us new ideas. This helped us to update our understanding of the questions we were asking and the issues we were investigating, and to make sure that our research was being done in a way that was safe and comfortable for our participants. We continually refined our ways of working with families, and the questions we were asking in our surveys, to make sure that the data we were collecting was robust and could help us to shed light on some of the most pressing challenges facing families in poverty, those who work with them, and the people making policies which impact their lives.
Some important things we learnt
A key feature of this project was that we used both qualitative and quantitative methods together – so we could use each type of data throughout the project and at the end, to help us to generate and test new ideas. This way of working helped us to be sure that the questions we were asking our participants were the right ones to be able to answer our overall questions at the end of the project.
We identified two key ways that families differed in how they went about talking about and sharing resources. One way was in the amount of information that parents shared with children about their family’s economic situation, and the other was the amount of influence children’s views were given in decisions about how family resources were used. We found out that children in general were very active in trying to maintain or improve their family’s material well-being, and were sensitive to the pressures on their parents – whether or not parents spoke openly about these.
We also found that networks of stakeholders were important in family material well-being, going well beyond the nuclear family. For example, grandparents, step families, and grown up siblings were all important actors in shaping families’ conditions and experiences.
Importantly, though, although there were lots of differences between families, these were not related to how well-off families were. That is, there were no differences in how families made decisions about sharing their resources based on whether they were in poverty or not. There were also no differences in the ambitions and attitudes of children and parents in our research – all families were working hard to make a good life for themselves, and parents wanted the best for their children. We did find that families living in poverty had more challenges in the way when trying to achieve this – and the scale of resources available to them from their networks was often much smaller than for better-off families. This was true of financial and material resources, but also social and educational experiences. For example, in one well-off family a boy was offered work experience in the head office of a rich relative’s business, while a girl from a family living in poverty was offered work experience doing entry-level work at her local leisure centre where a friend of the family worked.
A key finding from this project was that the families living in poverty often faced a great deal of stigma about their situation – and parents and children learnt to hide their experiences and adjust their expectations. Their aspirations were just the same as better-off children – but to avoid stress, embarrassment and bullying they would often pretend to want less than they did. Based on this we developed a rights-based approach to generating change, starting with changing how we think and talk about families in poverty so that we make changes to the resources they have and the ways organisations and other people relate to them, rather than trying to change their behaviour or attitudes.
Find out more
There are lots of resources we made from this project which you can access to find out more.
We made an animation based on our key findings, setting out what we think could help to improve things for families living in poverty.
You can read our final project report and the executive summary (which is much shorter!) here.
Some academic articles based on this research are free to read. These cover: