Conceptual notes

This conceptual note explores work, paid and unpaid, looks at how the PSE research can examine the impact of the trend to an economy based on higher levels of low pay and insecurity and the impact of this on the extent to which paid work reduces poverty. The PSE also explores the quality of work in terms of aspects such as job security, control, flexibility, physical and social environment, anti-social hours and overall satisfaction. And finally the PSE study explores unpaid work and captures estimates of time spend on various forms of unpaid work covering work in the house, caring and voluntary work.

How poverty and/or low income are mediated and affected by family considerations are considered. These could be through practices, exigencies or condition, resources, processes and relations. Five main sets of ideas or concepts are considered as ways of framing key aspects of the approach: family practices and the way that family members organise their lives; capital (social and cultural) and how it is utilised through connections and networks; culture, including values, meaning, rules and the like; capacities in the sense of the resources and dispositions available to people to take action; and family solidarity looking at practices of reciprocity and mutual assistance among family members over and above personal interest.

Support for most local services, in the sense of seeing them as being essential, remains very high and has in some cases increased since 1999. This is despite several decades of the promotion of ideas about privatisation of services and the current Coalition government’s austerity measures that have resulted in major reductions in spending on local public services, which will have a significant impact on both the level and quality of provision. In this context, this note explores the impact local services have on poverty, the quality and availability of services in poorer areas and the role local services play in anti-poverty strategies.

There is a great deal of academic debate around the measurement of child poverty. The PSE: UK research provides the opportunity to gain a more nuanced picture of child poverty, drawing on three measurement approaches that can be investigated individually and/or combined to form composite measures. These approaches include income poverty, deprivation and social exclusion.