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.
This paper discusses indicators relating to Domain 4 (‘Cultural Resources’) and Domain 7 (‘Cultural Participation’) of the revised Bristol Social Exclusion Matrix (BSEM) for use in the current Poverty and Social Exclusion survey. In the BSEM, education is treated as a resource as well as an aspect of cultural participation. Questions in the PSE survey therefore need to cover both the educational resources (human capital) of the adults in the survey, i.e. their educational background, and the educational resources currently received by children.