Researching Poverty

Jonathan Bradshaw, Roy Sainsbury

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138740723
• eBook ISBN: 9781351727822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This title was first published in 2000: This collection of papers reviews the theory, method and policy relevance of post-war poverty research. It is designed to contribute to bringing high quality research in this area back to the centre of both social research and informed policy debate.

1 Editors' Introduction

JONATHAN BRADSHAW and ROY SAINSBURY

The conference to mark the centenary of Seebohm Rowntree's first study of poverty in York has resulted in three volumes of proceedings. The first volume Getting the measure of poverty: the early legacy of Seebohm Rowntree (Bradshaw and Sainsbury, 2000) is largely devoted to papers covering the pre Second World War era. This volume Researching Poverty and the third volume Experiencing Poverty (Bradshaw and Sainsbury, 2000) represent a picture of the state of poverty research in the late 1990s, after a period of 20 years when Britain had a government not particularly concerned with poverty and not much interested in funding research into it.

It is clear from the papers in these volumes that poverty research is nevertheless alive and well. Thanks to the individual commitment of scholars, the generosity of trusts, and particularly the Joseph Rowntree Foundation who funded many of the projects on which the chapters in these volumes are based, poverty studies have continued to flourish with some significant advances both in concepts and method. In a session at the end of the conference we invited a panel to apply their minds to thinking about the future of poverty research but we think that the papers in these volumes represent an effective review of the present of poverty research.

It is absolutely appropriate that this volume should open with a paper by Peter Townsend. If Seebohm Rowntree could be described as the father of poverty research in the pre war era. Townsend is by far the dominant figure in the post war era. It was his work mainly which led to a move away from prewar notions of poverty as lack of physical necessities or minimum subsistence towards an understanding of poverty as relative deprivation (Townsend, 1962). It was his pioneering study with Brian Abel Smith The Poor and the Poorest which was more or less responsible for the 'rediscovery of poverty' (Abel Smith and Townsend, 1965). He was the first to operationalise the concept of relative poverty in empirical research using deprivation indicators in his mammoth Poverty in the United Kingdom (Townsend, 1979). He has consistently sought to link poverty in industrialised nations with the poverty of the Third World (for example see his essay in the Concept of Poverty (Townsend, 1970) and his collection of essays The International Analysis of Poverty (Townsend, 1993). He has also been the leading figure in debates about health inequalities (Townsend, Davidson and Whitehead, 1982) and in research on the subject (Townsend, Phillimore and Βeattie, 1988). All this is in addition to his two great classic studies The Family Life of Old People (Townsend. 1957) and The Last Refuge (Townsend, 1962). Some of this work he refers to in his essay in this volume on post war poverty research in which he reflects on the interconnected themes of concepts; operational definitions; explanation and policies. In particular he stresses the scientists' obligation to have regard to policy something he has always done - in the Fabian Society, the Labour Party, the Child Poverty Action Group and the Disability Alliance. In his chapter he reasserts that poverty can be scientifically determined as a line or threshold and also argues for the internationalisation of poverty research, not least because the causes of poverty are to be found outside national boundaries in the policies of international agencies and trans-national corporations. He ends with a challenging comment '... the body of work on poverty towards the end of the 20^th century lacks scientific focus. This is because the subject is too strongly appropriated by political and economic, not to say global ideology.'

In the next chapter David Gordon takes up Townsend's argument by showing that there can be objective scientific measures of poverty and in doing so explores the notions of 'Absolute' and 'Overall' poverty and some other ways that poverty and social exclusion can be operationalised. Sue Middleton outlines how it is possible to bring together consensual measures of poverty with budget standards techniques to establish agreed poverty lines by using carefully selected focus groups to discuss, negotiate and agree minimum essential needs.

One of the most encouraging modern developments in poverty research has been in the use of administrative data - especially data on benefit receipt to analyse the spatial distribution of poverty at the University of Oxford. Smith and Noble's chapter presents some of this recent work based on housing benefit records and demonstrates some of the advantages and disadvantages of administrative data and how it can be used to answer important questions. Another welcome new source of data for poverty researchers and one as yet under exploited is the Family Resources Survey which has a much larger sample than the Family Expenditure Survey which has been used most commonly to analyse income poverty since the 1950s. Liz Tadd who is responsible for the Family Resources Survey at DSS shows in her chapter how the survey can be used to explore incomes by ethnicity, gender, age and region.

There follow four chapters devoted to the spatial analysis of poverty - but of a very different kinds. Ian Gregory, Humphrey Southall and Daniel Dorling explore the distribution of poverty at four periods over the century to explore the north-south divide, urban rural differences, inter-urban patterns and whether relative poverty has become less extreme. Glen BramJey and Martin Evans report some results of their major study for DETR on the distribution of public expenditure and highlight in particular how the distributional pattern relates to the relative poverty or affluence of neighbourhoods. Roger Burrows and David Rhodes draw on an analysis of the Survey of English Housing to establish the sources of variation in residents perception of the areas in which they live. By applying this to 1991 census data they develop a spatial patterning of households in England who are dissatisfied with the area in which they live and then relate this to indices of area disadvantage. Linda Harvey and David Backwith's chapter is a detailed analysis of Haverhill where a young population suffers high levels of unemployment and ill-health, poverty, family breakdown and high mortality due to female suicide - all due to the post-war relocation of families there from London.

Jan Pahl and Lou Opit, who pioneered the study of the distribution of money within the household, turns her attention to the impact of the electronic economy (credit cards, debit cards, telephone and computer banking) on the intra household distribution and on the financial exclusion of unemployed people and older people.

John Washington. Ian Paylor and Jennifer Harris examine the shift from the use of the word poverty to the use of social exclusion in the context of the European Union's three poverty programmes and the implications of this for social work practice in Europe.

Finally, Ruth Lister and Peter Beresford draw on a study in which they spoke to groups of people with extensive experience of poverty to argue that there needs to be more emphasise in poverty research in what people who are poor think about poverty and what they think should be done about it.

References

Abel Smith, Β. and Townsend, P. (1965), The Poor and the Poorest, Bell, London,

Bradshaw, J. and Sainsbury, R. (2000), Getting the Measure of Poverty: The Early Legacy of Seebohm Rowntree, Ashgate, Aldershot.

Bradshaw, J. and Sainsbury, R. (2000), Experiencing Poverty, Ashgate, Aldershot.

Townsend, P. (1962), The Last Refuge, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Townsend, P. (1957), The Family Life of Old People, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Townsend, P. (1962), 'The Meaning of Poverty', ΒJ Sociology, September.

Townsend, P. (1979), Poverty in the United Kingdom, Penguin Books and Allen Lane, London.

Townsend, P. (ed) (1970), The Concept of Poverty, Heinemann, London.

Townsend, P. (1993), The International Analysis of Poverty, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hemstead.

Townsend, P., Davidson, N. and Whitehead (eds) (1993), Inequalities in Health: The Black Report and the Health Divide, Penguin Books.

Townsend, P., Phillimore, P. and Beattie, A. (1988), Health and Deprivation: Inequality and the North, Croom Helm, London.

2 Post-1945 Poverty Research and Things to Come

PETER TOWNSEND

Britain has a long tradition of concerned investigation of poverty. There have been low points and high points in that history - in scientific accomplishment, government acknowledgement of the problem and action to increase or reduce it. Each of these is a huge, inviting and properly controversial, theme.

The subject drew me like a magnet. I was a child in the depression years of the 1930s. I was the only child in a lone parent family. My grandmother spoke of dead babies having to be placed in makeshift wooden coffins by poor families in the back streets of Middlesbrough, where we lived in my early years. My mother was a soprano whose fees depended on the unpredictable invitations from theatrical agents for single evening shows, interspersed with more regular work in summer concert parties on seaside piers. When I was four we moved from Yorkshire to Pimlico in London and from one cheap room or flat to the next. My version of rags to riches as a boy was from eating tripe and onions warmed up for a second and third day when I came back at lunch-time from school in London, to revelling in Italian ice-cream several times each August day under the Central pier at Blackpool. For three months each year, when my mother sang in concert-parties on seaside piers, I was taken from school and spent my days on the sands with my grandmother. Another, deeply imprinted, pair of contrasting images are of cricket on a pitch across a city street, with wickets chalked on the house walls, and the glorious boundless expanse of cricket on the Blackpool sands. I did not register how often my grandmother sought to protect me from the worst effects of those switchback living standards.

History is in part personal history. The two are inseparable - however tiny the individual is in the shape of things. Experience can lead to research, but that research then becomes experience. The interchangeability of the two is highly charged and can become influential. The connectedness took me a long time to understand. One familiar current example is post-modernism, in which the idea is embedded. History works with the present and dismembers the certainty of contemporary fashions of thought. At the same time the potentialities of designing the future become as exhilaratingly unhindered as they become constrained.

A second example of this connectedness for me is the Black Report on Inequalities in Health (Black, 1980; Townsend, Whitehead and Davidson, 1992; and see also a number of studies bearing out the original analysis during the 1990s, including Benzeval, Judge and Solomon, 1992; McCarron, Davey-Smith and Wormersley, 1994; Phillimore, Beattie and Townsend, 1994; Botting, 1995; Harding, 1995 and Davey-Smith and Brunner, 1997). In the late 1970s I had the luck to be involved in its preparation. I found myself drawing on the unconscious as well as conscious lessons of previous research and personal life. The structure of the Black Report came to be seen as critical. In presenting the results of a review of inequalities in health four key themes were linked but had to be distinguished - and so they were in successive chapters of the report...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Editors' Introduction
• 2 Post-1945 Poverty Research and Things to Come
• 3 The Scientific Measurement of Poverty: Recent Theoretical Advances
• 4 Agreeing Poverty Lines: The Development of Consensual Budget Standards Methodology
• 5 Developing the Use of Administrative Data to Study Poverty
• 6 Analysis of Low Income Using the Family Resources Survey
• 7 A Century of Poverty in England and Wales, 1898-1998: A Geographical Analysis
• 8 Urban Deprivation and Government Expenditure: Where Does Spending Go?
• 9 The Geography of Misery: Area Disadvantage and Patterns of Neighbourhood Dissatisfaction in England
• 10 From Poverty to Social Exclusion? The Legacy of London Overspill in Haverhill
• 11 Patterns of Exclusion in the Electronic Economy
• 12 Poverty Studies in Europe and the Evolution of the Concept of Social Exclusion
• 13 Where are 'the Poor' in the Future of Poverty Research?