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Deprivation
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22/03/2012
Government publishes strategy for achieving social justice
The government has laid out its strategy for achieving social justice. The strategy, Social Justice, Transforming Lives, Cm 8314, is based on the following principles:
Category: Reports -
22/11/2011
Social exclusion
Many of the approaches to poverty explored in other sections within ‘Definitions of poverty’ incorporate within them aspects of social exclusion. The definition of ‘overall poverty’ adopted by the United Nations talks of ‘social discrimination and exclusion’ and of ‘lack of participation in decision-making civil, social and cultural life’. Elements of social exclusion are an integral part of Townsend’s conception of poverty (see Deprivation and poverty), and the original Breadline Britain and subsequent PSE surveys (see Consensual method) incorporated aspects of social exclusion within the concept of necessities (such as ‘celebrations on special occasions’ or ‘a hobby or leisure activity’).
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16/11/2011
Consensual method
The consensual or ‘perceived deprivation’ approach to measuring poverty follows the deprivation approach to measuring poverty by looking at direct measures of living standards rather than indirect income measures. But here, deprivation is seen in terms of an enforced lack of ‘necessities’ as determined by public opinion.
The 1983 Breadline Britain study pioneered this ‘consensual’ approach to measuring poverty by investigating, for the first time ever, the public’s perceptions of minimum needs:
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16/11/2011
Deprivation and poverty
Direct measures of poverty that look at deprivation and living standards have a very long history, particularly in Britain. From Charles Booth and before, through to Seebholm Rowntree and Peter Townsend in the twentieth century, the living conditions of the poor have been investigated to establish those who live in poverty.
Peter Townsend, in particular, pioneered a relative deprivation approach to poverty that covered a wide range of aspects of living standards, both material and social. For Townsend:
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08/11/2011
Children identify what matters to them
The lack of material items and experiences selected by children themselves as needed for ‘a normal kind of life’ provide a better predictor of children’s well-being than conventional measures, finds research conducted for The Children’s Society, Missing Out: A Child-centred Analysis of Material Deprivation and Subjective Well-being. The researchers put together a ten item index based on focus group discussions with, in total, 36 boys and girls aged between 8 to 15 from Leeds, Warrington and London about what they felt they needed.
Items required to fit in with their friends figured strongly on the index. ‘Well you probably wouldn’t have any friends if you didn’t have [cable or satellite] TV’, comments one 10-to-11 year-old, while another 14-to-15 year-old comments, ‘Now it’s like your friends are not just for their personality but also kind of how they look…’ But so did time together as a family and doing things as a family. The final index covered:
Category: Reports -
17/08/2011
European Union
There is considerable agreement across European Union member states as to what people regard as necessities, despite the cultural and economic differences. Explore the findings on a country by country basis.
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