A multidimensional approach to child poverty in Taiwan

To elucidate the multidimensional nature of poverty, this study analyzed child deprivation and social exclusion in Taiwan. First, a fuzzy set approach was used to construct an aggregate poverty index, to measure the levels of perceived necessity, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by children. The study involved conducting a decomposition analysis to measure the poverty index according to certain dimensions. Second, this study involved analyzing possible determinants of perceived necessity, deprivation, and social exclusion, using seemingly unrelated regression models. We used cross-sectional data obtained from the Household Living Conditions Survey conducted in 2014. The results suggest that over two-thirds of the respondents identified all the items as necessary. Three highest levels of perceived necessity were housing, medical care, and clothing dimensions. Children faced high risks of deprivation and exclusion. The three highest levels of deprivation and exclusion were exhibited in the dimensions of environment, recreation, and education; the lowest two levels of deprivation and exclusion were exhibited in the dimensions of medical care and housing. The dimensions with higher levels of deprivation and exclusion exhibited higher relative contributions to facilitating poverty reduction. Moreover, evaluation of income and expenditure, family income, and family type were significantly related to the degree of perceived necessity and the levels of deprivation and exclusion. Those living in families with a large number of children exhibited a higher level of deprivation. Education of the caregivers was closely linked to social exclusion of children. This paper represents preliminary and small-scale research; however, several implications for methodology and policy can be derived from this study.     

Dynamic Measures of Individual Deprivation

We introduce a one-parameter class of individual deprivation measures. Motivated by a suggestion of Runciman, we modify Yitzhaki’s index by multiplying it by a function that is interpreted as measuring the part of deprivation generated by an agent’s observation that others in his reference group move on to a higher level of income than himself. The parameter reflects the relative weight given to these dynamic considerations, and the standard Yitzhaki index is obtained as a special case. In addition, we characterize more general classes of measures that pay attention to this important dynamic aspect of deprivation.     

Relative labour deprivation and urban migration in Turkey

The paper develops a concept, a measure and an index of relative labour deprivation and applies these tools to measure deprivation in urban areas of South-East Turkey. It is shown how a Yitzhaki-type of relative deprivation index can be applied to the labor domain and be extended to take into account the notion of reference group derived from modern theories of social justice. In the absence of panel or longitudinal data, such measure results particularly useful to derive policy recommendations for areas characterized by heterogeneous communities. Contrary to what conventional statistics and wisdom would suggest, we find migrants from Eastern Turkey to be less relatively labour deprived than other groups of migrants.     

Cross-national differences in determinants of multiple deprivation in Europe

This paper analyses the relationship between deprivation, income and other individual dimensions over time, in eleven European countries, exploiting the longitudinal nature of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). First, the determinants of deprivation are analysed by using individual fixed effects models for each country separately. Second, a decomposition of the deprivation gaps between countries highlights the main reasons for the differentials across Europe. The results show that changes in income and deprivation do not strictly coincide and highlight the importance of employment status and income sources. In countries where deprivation is higher income is more effective in reducing the deprivation differential. However, a relevant part of the deprivation gap is attributable to a country specific effect revealing the importance of unobserved factors like cultural attitudes and institutions.     

Deprivation and lifestyles in rural Wales. — I. Towards a cultural dimension

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of research into deprivation in mid-Wales. It argues that the current debate on rural deprivation has left many important questions unanswered. In particular, we still know relatively little about the extent of deprivation, the specific social groups affected by it, the particular experiences of these groups, and the importance of cultural dimensions to that experience. Indeed, the very term deprivation has become somewhat chaotic, and may subsume a number of different ways in which individuals and groups can become marginalised in rural areas. The two case studies in rural Wales discussed here give some indication of the extent and anatomy of marginalisation within particular communities. Perhaps more importantly they highlight the need to consider the importance of cultural marginalisation within a wider understanding of the problems of living in rural areas.     

“Jesus Would Turn the Tables Over”: Five Dimensions of Authenticity Applied to Countercultural Christianity

This paper draws on extant literature to identify five dimensions that are deployed by a wide range of social groups to claim and achieve authenticity in variety of social settings: being honest or real, forgoing external rewards or compensation, coming from or living in the right place or time, embodying or participating in something, and consuming correctly. We then demonstrate the utility of these five dimensions of authenticity in action by applying them to two different qualitative studies of countercultural Christians. Our analysis of these data shows that different communities have different understandings of what makes one authentic, but the five dimensions that we outline in this article make comparisons across different groups possible.     

Comparing poverty and deprivation dynamics: Issues of reliability and validity

In this paper we seek to establish if earlier findings relating to the relationship between income poverty persistence and deprivation persistence could be due to a failure to take measurement error into account. To address this question, we apply a model of dynamics incorporating structural and error components. Our analysis shows a general similarity between latent poverty and deprivation dynamics. In both cases we substantially over-estimate the probability of exiting from poverty or deprivation. We observe a striking similarity across dimensions for both observed and latent outcomes. In both cases levels of poverty and deprivation persistence are higher for the latent case. However, there is no evidence that earlier results relating to the differences in the determinants of poverty and deprivation persistence are a consequence of differential patterns of reliability. Taking measurement error into account seems more likely to accentuate rather than diminish the contrasts highlighted by earlier research. Since longitudinal differences relating to poverty and deprivation cannot be accounted for by measurement error, it seems that we must accept that we are confronted with issues relating to validity rather than reliability. Even where we measure these dimensions over reasonable periods of time and allow for measurement error, they continue to tap relatively distinct phenomenon. Thus, if measures of persistent poverty are to constitute an important component of EU social indicators, a strong case can be made for including parallel measures of deprivation persistence and continuing to explore the relationship between them.     

Characterizing how to aggregate the individuals�� deprivations in a multidimensional framework

Most of the existing multidimensional poverty indices are constructed in two steps. First, the deprivation felt by each individual with respect to each attribute is computed. Then, these deprivations are aggregated to form a summary index of the overall deprivation. This paper explores properties for the aggregation stage and analyzes their implications. The axioms we propose are necessary and sufficient to characterize a procedure to aggregate the different individuals’ deprivations in order to measure the extent of deprivation in society.     

Measuring employment deprivation in the EU using a household-level index

We propose an aggregate measure of employment deprivation among households that follows a methodological framework developed to measure wellbeing. This index verifies a set of reasonable axioms that other available measures do not: increases in three relevant employment deprivation elements-incidence, intensity and inequality. Incidence captures how many households in a population are touched by a lack of employment, while employment deprivation intensity reflects how far households are, on average, from being non-deprived of employment. Finally, employment deprivation inequality increases with the concentration of unemployment among few households. Based on this index, we analyze employment deprivation across the European Union using information from Labor Force Surveys during the current “Great Recession.” Our results provide evidence on the relevance of incorporating the household dimension to identify unemployment profiles, with a variety of implications, in terms of household wellbeing. Specifically, we show that countries with similar (intermediate) unemployment rates differ in their patterns of employment deprivation once the structure of employment across households is incorporated.     

Improving and measuring transparency in NGOs: A disclosure index for activities and projects

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are established not with the aim of making profits but rather to provide social values by implementing different projects and activities. Transmitting complete information about these projects to society is a key element of transparency, as they operate within an atmosphere of public trust. Although there is a large body of literature on transparency in NGOs from a global perspective, very little research has been conducted on transparency within the area of projects and activities. This study takes a deeper look at this line and contributes to the literature on transparency in NGOs by proposing an index to measure the information transparency of the projects implemented by these organizations. The index captures three dimensions of the information about the projects (technical, financial, and scope) and makes it possible to: analyze the level of transparency of the portfolio of projects, detect the specific aspects that could be improved in each organization, and carry out comparisons among organizations.     

Beyond answers: dimensions of the advice network

In this paper, we report the result of a research project investigating social aspects of knowledge sharing and development. Prior research in a consulting firm revealed that respondents recognized five kinds of informational benefits when consulting others: solutions, meta-knowledge, problem reformulation, validation and legitimation. We employed these dimensions in a systematic network analysis of a different sample of people (human resource managers in a large conglomerate), using each of the five benefits as kinds of social relations. Two general research questions guided the analysis. First, how are these relations related to each other (multiplexity)? Do individuals obtain all of the benefits from the same individuals, or do they create balanced portfolios of complementary contacts that provide different benefits? Second, what properties and shapes do the networks induced by these relations form (structure)? What is the basis for who is tied to whom on each relation? The fundamental result emerging from both research questions is that the five relations seem to form a unidimensional scale such that a contact who provides any given benefit is also very likely to provide all the benefits that are lower on the scale. Position on this scale seems to index underlying dimensions of social solidarity rather than individual attributes such as status. Consequently, relations at the end of the scale (e.g. legitimation) were more homophilous and proved to be strongly diagnostic of subgroup boundaries, a fact which could be quite useful in consulting or other applied contexts. This research contributes to the literature on knowledge management by revealing diverse ways that consulting others facilitates knowledge creation and utilization. The research also contributes to social network analysis by examining meanings and relationships among social relations, an area that is understudied. We found that the five benefits, treated as social relations, formed an entailment structure consistent with a Guttman scale. We also found that relations lower in the scale flowed smoothly across historical organizational boundaries whereas relations higher in the scale did not.     

Developing a Crisis Management Index: Applications in South Korea

The purpose of this study is to develop a crisis management index that can gauge a corporation's integrated crisis management capabilities. Although most crisis management models have been devised in Western countries, no full-scale crisis management index has been developed outside the Western hemisphere. This study deploys multiple research stages that reflect the characteristics of crisis management. First, the study validates index items through an extensive literature review, in-depth interviews, and professional audits. The dimensions of the index items are evaluated through an exploratory factor analysis and verified with construct validity through a confirmatory factor analysis. The final index dimensions—the organizational strategy, the organization system and culture, and the execution and communication—were applied to the case of South Korean corporations, and the implications based on their index scores are discussed.     

Development of a framework for classifying threat and neglect in childhood: A qualitative study

Quantification of childhood adversity has typically involved a cumulative risk approach in which total number of discrete adversities serves as an index of overall risk. However, this approach fails to account for the growing evidence of differential outcomes following exposure to childhood adversities. An alternative approach adopts a dimensional perspective, with growing evidence for distinct developmental impacts associated with exposure to threat (violence/abuse) and deprivation (neglect). This study developed a framework for the classification of these dimensions through a thematic analysis of health practitioners' views and accounts of different forms of childhood adversity. Ten health practitioners experienced in working with children with challenging behaviours and neurodevelopmental disorders participated in semi-structured interviews regarding definitions and examples of six categories of adversity: physical/emotional/sexual abuse, physical/emotional neglect, and domestic and family violence. The qualitative analysis identified 23 themes across the six categories of adversity, along with two overarching themes regarding ambiguity of classifying exposures and non-specific outcomes of exposures. Themes were integrated to provide a framework and checklist for classifying indicators of exposure to threat and deprivation. The findings offer a framework and checklist for the assessment of threat and deprivation that will allow for further testing of the dimensional risk model.     

Binary data,hierarchy of attributes,and multidimensional deprivation

Empirical estimation of multidimensional deprivation measures has gained momentum in the last few years. Several existing measures assume that deprivation dimensions are cardinally measurable, when, in many instances, such data is not always available. In this paper, we propose a class of deprivation measures when the only information available is whether an individual is deprived in an attribute or not. The framework is then extended to a setting in which the multiple dimensions are grouped as basic attributes that are of fundamental importance for an individual’s quality of life and non-basic attributes which are at a much lower level of importance. Empirical illustrations of the proposed measures are provided based on the estimation of multidimensional deprivation among children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam.     

On the joint evaluation of absolute and relative deprivation

We lay out alternative ways of melding measures of absolute and relative deprivation in an index of overall deprivation, exploring the choices the analyst faces in this enterprise. The indices derived are used to answer two important empirical questions. First, did overall deprivation fall in the BRICS–Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa– between the early 1990s and late 2000s, alongside the fall in absolute deprivation? Second, what is the relationship between reductions in overall deprivation and economic growth? We show that the standard portrayal of the BRICS as economic success stories as well as the emphasis placed on economic growth in the reduction of deprivation must be qualified to some extent.     

Improvements in children’s health: Does inequality matter?

The literature on the contributions to poverty reduction of average improvements in living standards vs. distributional changes uses only one measure of well-being – income or expenditure. Given that poverty is defined by deprivation over different dimensions, we explore the role of average improvements and distributional changes in children’s health and nutrition using the height of young children as our measure of well-being. Similar to the income literature, we find that shifts in the mean level of heights, not changes in distribution, account for most improvements in heights. Unlike the literature on income inequality, however, there is a positive association between improvements in average heights and reduced dispersion of those heights.     

Poverty in the Enlarged European Union. A Discussion about Definitions and Reference Groups

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) has stirred discussion about the relevance of the traditional EU poverty indicator which measures poverty in relative and national terms. As a result of diverging living conditions of the poor in the old and new member states, some authors have argued in favour of alternative poverty measures. One line of thought is that the reference groups people use for evaluating their living standard have Europeanised and that a poverty measure should incorporate this evolution. Bowing on the rich literature on the conceptualisation of poverty and reference group theory, we argue that a distinction must be made between privately oriented reference groups and publicly oriented reference groups. Although research has mainly focused on the former type of reference groups, only the latter offers a norm to define the poverty threshold. We conclude with a research proposal to construct poverty lines driven by publicly oriented reference groups.     

‘Deprivation’ and ‘the rural’: An investigation into contradictory discourses

This paper investigates the issue of ‘rural deprivation’ using material collected for the Rural Lifestyles Project, conducted at Saint David's University College, Lampeter. The concept of ‘deprivation’ usually deployed within the literature in rural studies is problematic, and a number of criticisms are made about existing conceptualisations of the term. One of these criticisms is based on the finding that amongst respondents interviewed for the study of lifestyles in rural areas of England, a number were highly critical of the application of the term ‘deprivation’ to rural areas. This issue is explored through an investigation of the discourses of ‘the rural’, taken to mean a system of meanings that describe English rural areas. An examination of these discourses shows how ‘deprivation’ is denied, and this is investigated through a discussion of the representation of rural areas as problem-free and ‘idyllic’ in some way; through the portrayal of ‘deprivation’ as a fault of the individual; and through the construction of ‘deprivation’ as a feature of ‘the rural's’ ‘other’, i.e. the urban. The paper concludes with a call for the attitudes and beliefs of different groups of people living in rural areas to be taken account of in the production of research into lifestyles in rural areas.     

Who Cares If Police Become Violent? Explaining Approval of Police Use of Force Using a National Sample

Understanding police violence is important in part because police violence, if generally tolerated, could transform a society based on law into one governed by political and personal whim. This research asks whether the conflict perspective can explain which groups are more likely to approve of police use of force, and whether several dimensions of power are at issue or just a few. Previous studies have found that race is the most important factor in determining approval of police use of force. Gender, age, class, and other variables have shown mixed results. Using a national sample (1998 General Social Survey), this paper contributes a more comprehensive examination of this issue to the small body of literature in this area. We look at approval of police use of force in five scenarios. Our findings show that minorities and women are more likely to disapprove of police use of force. Supporting a narrow application of conflict theory, other dimensions of power appear not to affect attitudes toward police hitting citizens. Context of violence matters too. When situations are not actively threatening for officers, by near consensus, violence is unacceptable. Disagreement comes from less clear-cut circumstances.     

Relative Deprivation and Social Movements: A Critical Look at Twenty Years of Theory and Research*

The relative deprivation perspective was widely employed in the social movement literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In spite of the growing popularity of some newer approaches which criticize the relative deprivation perspective (resource mobilization or resource management perspectives), there have been no attempts to analyze and evaluate the relative deprivation perspective in any systematic fashion. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the “classic” relative deprivation literature in order to critically assess the perspective on the basis of its theoretical coherence and clarity and its empirical validity. The general conclusion reached is that while the relative deprivation perspective was an advance over earlier approaches which viewed social movements as resulting from the expression of irrational impulses, the relative deprivation perspective is itself affected by too many serious conceptual, theoretical, and empirical weaknesses to be useful in accounting for the emergence and development of social movements.