Abstract
Child poverty is high on the policy agenda in the UK and the European Union. But poverty and deprivation is almost exclusively measured by asking adults (parents) about their incomes and living standards. Some qualitative work has been done asking children about poverty but this article develops a new, child-centric measure using children as informants. Data from two surveys run by the Children’s Society are used, both covering children aged 8–16. One included 2,000 respondents and data were linked to income data provided by parents; the other included almost 5,500 respondents and covered detailed topics relating to children’s material situation and their subjective well-being. A new ten item deprivation index was developed and children were asked whether they lacked the items, and if so whether they wanted them or not. It was found that this index explained more of the variation in subjective well-being than parental income poverty explained. This is partly because there were deprived children living in families which were not income poor and non deprived children living in families which were income poor. Child material deprivation was found to be more strongly related to low subjective well-being than the absence of deprivation was to high subjective well-being.
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Notes
Though there are only a very small number of children in this category (7). However, the pattern of the results lends some credibility to the results despite the small numbers.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Children’s Society who funded the surveys used in this article and specifically to Gwyther Rees, Larissa Pople, Haridhan Goswami and Antonia Keung for feedback on various stages of this research. Many thanks also to two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Main, G., Bradshaw, J. A Child Material Deprivation Index. Child Ind Res 5, 503–521 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-012-9145-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-012-9145-7