Social Research Collective

We know that poverty has a huge, negative impact on the lives of people who experience it. For children in particular, it impacts their life chances in adulthood as well as their opportunities during childhood. The ways people usually measure poverty look at the resources available to a household. This means that there’s a big focus on income, and sometimes adults are asked about resources they have access to. Children are often assumed to have the same experiences as their parents, and are not asked to share their own experiences or views on what they have and don’t have, and the impact this has on them. This is a problem because we know that resources aren’t necessarily shared equally or fairly between different members of the same household. For example, a lot of research shows that in man-woman couples, men tend to have a larger share than women. This project looked into how children might fit into this picture, by developing a measure of poverty based on what they, rather than their parents or other experts, say they need.

Our approach

We facilitated conversations with groups of children to discuss what they saw as their needs, and then used the data generated in these focus groups to develop items to put into a survey. In the focus groups, we used creative methods like drawing, creating stories and moving around the room to get to the core of which things children needed for a ‘normal kind of life’. We also explored with them why these things were important – and what the impacts would be of not having them. We then drew out a list of items to test in a survey, based on the things children had said were most important and which they had strong reasons for identifying as necessities. We did a pilot survey using 20 items, asking children whether they had each one, didn’t have it and wanted it, or didn’t have it and didn’t want it. We compared responses across things like age, gender, race, and socio-economic status to make sure that the final ten items we selected made a good measure statistically and in relation to what the items meant to the children we had spoken to. Finally, we included the ten-item scale in a survey of 6,000 children aged 8-17, and discovered that this scale was a better predictor of outcomes for children than poverty measures based on income or what adults think children need. For example, there were much stronger links between being deprived on this scale and having lower subjective well-being.

Using mixed methods on this project helped us to make sure we kept an eye on both statistical robustness and the social meaning of the measure we were developing. This is important because a good statistical measure has to be very closely linked to the concept it is designed to capture. Starting with qualitative focus groups meant that children’s phrasing and perspectives were at the centre of the scale we created – often, measurement scales are created by academic experts rather than people who have actual experience of the thing being measured, which can lead to mistakes and misinterpretations. We avoided that by going back and forth between the focus group data and the statistics when we were doing our final analysis, to check that our interpretations of what the data meant were consistent with what children had told us about their lives and their needs.

Some important things we learnt

This measure was the first that had been developed which put children’s perspectives on their needs at the centre of how we understand and measure child poverty. This resulted in a much more powerful measure – it can tell us about what children have and need, and also help us to understand how lacking the things children need creates negative outcomes. This helps to design interventions to improve children’s lives at different levels. Overall, there is a huge need for the government to increase social security levels and the social safety net, so that families have enough. But at a smaller scale, the measure can, for example, help schools to see how some practices like requiring expensive kit or money for trips might identify children as being in poverty, opening them up to bullying and exclusion. 

For the most part, children and parents had similar ideas about what children needed. However, there were some interesting differences.

Another key difference were the things children identified as necessities for having fun and fitting in. Children saw parents as being dismissive of these needs at times, when in reality their lives could be badly impacted. In the focus groups, children frequently talked about being bullied, and even admitted to bullying others, for not having the right kind of clothes and shoes to fit in with peers. Not all children wanted the same clothes and shoes – but they all had a sense of some children not having any of the ‘right’ things, and therefore being excluded.

Children’s discussions of their needs was far from simplistic or materialistic. All of the things identified by children had symbolic as well as material importance. Children had a clear sense of a spectrum, with some families having a huge amount more than they needed, while others struggled to get by. They identified a point towards the bottom of the scale which you couldn’t go below while fitting in with the rest of society. This fits closely with theories about poverty which highlight that having what we need to take a full part in society is important to our health, well-being and relationships.

Find out more

There are lots of resources we made from this project which you can access to find out more.

You can read our final project report here, and the executive summary (which is much shorter!) here.

An academic article which compares this new measure of child poverty with other measures in relation to children’s subjective well-being can be accessed for free here.