People in Places

By studying people in places, qualitative researchers look at multiple levels of social life. The study of people in places typically draws on case studies but cases themselves are used in a variety of ways. By studying people in places, qualitative researchers can consider joint enterprises as well as shared circumstances, draw on various types of data, examine both individuals and institutions, and attend to both structure and agency.     

A New Scale of Poverty: How the Officially Recorded Poor People in Turkey Perceive Themselves

Governments adopt policies to prevent and address the socioeconomic problem of poverty. This article examines how officially recorded poor people perceive themselves and the causes of their poverty. It is based on a sample of 531 officially recorded poor people living in the Turkish province of Çankiri. A questionnaire was administered comprising 69 characteristics of poverty. The findings suggest that there are four main causal explanations for poverty attributions: fatalism, discrimination, moral deficiencies and personal deficiencies. The measure developed for this research can be tested and applied to different cultural groups with a high level of validity and reliability.     

Spatial Redistribution of Poverty through Migration of Poor People to Depressed Rural Communities1

Recent demographic studies document movement of poor people from both urban and rural places to depressed rural communities. Such migration redistributes poverty to rural areas and further concentrates it within them. This article presents a case study of one depressed community in New York that became a migration destination for urban poor people, causing dramatic increases in poverty rate, welfare rolls, and service needs. On-site research showed that the community's attraction was inexpensive rental housing that had become available after loss of manufacturing jobs prompted a middle-class exodus. The lack of jobs was not a deterrent for low-income inmigrants, though, because many of them had limited job skills and other employment barriers and would have had difficulty getting or holding a job anyway. Similar processes of economic decline, population loss, and poverty inmigration appear to be occurring elsewhere also. The article identifies community-level impacts and policy implications; it concludes with suggestions for further research needs.     

Household Composition and Poverty among Female‐Headed Households with Children: Differences by Race and Residence*

Abstract We examine race and residential variation in the prevalence of female‐headed households with children and how household composition is associated with several key economic well‐being outcomes using data from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample of the U.S. Census. Special attention is paid to cohabiting female‐headed households with children and those that are headed by a single grandmother caring for at least one grandchild, because these are becoming more common living arrangements among female‐headed households with children. We find that in 2000: (1) cohabiting and grandmother female‐headed households with children comprised over one‐fourth of all female‐headed households with children, (2) household poverty is highest for female‐headed households with children that do not have other adult household earners, (3) earned income from other household members lifts many cohabiting and grandparental female‐headed households out of poverty, as does retirement and Social Security income for grandmother headed households, and (4) poverty is highest among racial/ethnic minorities and for female‐headed households with children in nonmetro compared to central cities and suburban areas.     

Foreign Remittances and Regional Poverty: Evidence from Household Data

This study examines the association between foreign remittances and poverty (incidence and severity) in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Logit regression is used to deal with binary headcount ratio, while the instrumental variable approach is employed to avoid possible endogeneity. Household-based data, covering more than 40,000 household units in Punjab, are used for the empirical estimations. After controlling for several variables, such as the number of dependents of households, age, gender, and education of the household head, the results indicate that foreign remittances’ inflow reduces the incidence and severity of poverty in all three regions of the Punjab province, North Punjab, South Punjab and Central Punjab. The South Punjab, however, is found to be poorer based on headcount poverty and severity of poverty as compared to the other two regions.     

Bioenergy Futures: Framing Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Local Places

Sociotechnical imaginaries are collectively imagined forms of social life reflected in the design and fulfillment of technological projects. While it is implied that there may be contention around sociotechnical imaginaries, the literature on how that contention is manifested is scant. We use a frame‐analytic approach to demonstrate the potency of collective action frames for making sense of the national imaginaries underpinning siting proposals. As a case study, we use woody biomass bioenergy development in northern Michigan. After briefly outlining the multiple frames that are encompassed in the imaginary of bioenergy development, we focus on the “wood for energy” frame, employing the concept of “frame keys” to demonstrate how national imaginaries are interpreted differently by local and nonlocal actors involved in community sitings of proposed facilities. We find not only that frame keys are essential to how the national imaginary of bioenergy is interpreted, (re)produced, and responded to but also that framing processes are related to social movements that coalesce around competing collective memories of place.     

Poor Mothers and Habits of Hiding: Participatory Methods in Poverty Research

Poor mothers have long‐standing habits of hiding their lives in response to punitive authorities and stigma. We identify practices of hiding daily life, and we describe participatory research approaches for and ethical concerns in learning more about poor women's critical insights and survival strategies.     

Making and Shaping Poor Malawians: Citizenship Below the Poverty Line

This article explores a series of events in the global discourse on development and governance: the emergence of ‘the poor’ as a class of identifiable individuals rather than an abstract category; the preference for targeted development interventions; the organisation of beneficiaries into groups which are then used as sites for application of ‘governmentality’; and the Millennium Development Goals, which have necessitated national and local poverty lines corresponding to the global poverty line. One implication is that those below the poverty line may constitute a particular type of citizens: more subject to attempts to reform their rationality and conduct, and less the autonomous individuals that are presupposed by liberal democracy.     

Poverty and Disabled People: challenging dominant debates and policies

This article explores the relationship between poverty, disability and impairment in a global context. It challenges dominant critiques of poverty and disability, and explores the critiques, policy proposals and developments of the disabled people's movement to combat poverty. It offers an international perspective including the experience of both the North and South.     

Sexual Harassment in Public Places: Experiences of Canadian Women*

Des chercheurs ont étudié les cas de harcèlement sexuel en milieu de travail et dans les universités. En collaboration avec des experts judiciaires, ils ont conceptualisé le harcelement sexuel et en ont fait une question de droits de la personne. Notre recherche, fondée sur un sondage effectue en 1992 auprès de 1 990 femmes canadiennes, réVéle que le harcèlement sexuel se produit aussi dans les lieux publics. Nous présentons des données inédites sur le sujet en exa-minant le type, la fréquence et la gravité du harcèlement, les carac-téristiques des femmes le plus susceptibles d'être harcetées, les implications pouvant servir à bâtir une théone sur le harcèlement dans les lieux publics, les réactions des femmes a l'égard du harcèlement ainsi que ses conséquences sur les plans émotionnel et psychologique. Researchers have expended much effort studying sexual harassment in the workplace and universities. Together with legal experts, they have conceptualized sexual harassment as a human-rights issue: a form of sexual discrimination that typically occurs in relationships of unequal power. Our research, based on a 1992 survey o{ 1,990 Canadian women, suggests sexual harassment is also prevalent in public places such as streets, transit systems and malls. We supply rare data about sexual harassment in public places by examining the types, frequency, and severity of harassment; the characteristics of women most likely to be harassed; the theoretical implications of public harassment; women's responses to harassment; and its emotional and psychological effects.     

Minority Poverty in Nonmetropolitan Texas*

Abstract Despite a high prevalence of poverty among minorities in nonmetropolitan areas, research and policy concerns regarding poverty have continued focusing on metropolitan minorities. This study uses a model integrating individual, household, and structural factors to examine poverty among Latinos, blacks, and Anglos in nonmetropolitan and, for comparative purposes, metropolitan areas, using data from the 1985 Special Texas Census TDHS 1987. The findings show that minorities in nonmetropolitan areas tend to have the highest poverty rates. In addition, consistent as well as divergent patterns exist among the six ethnic-resident groups with respect to the relationships among the various individual, household, and structural factors and poverty.     

Opportunity Theory and Agricultural Crime Victimization*

Abstract A growing body of research lends support to opportunity theory and its variants, but has yet to focus systematically on a number of specific offenses and contexts. Typically, the more crimes and contexts to which a theory applies, the broader its scope and range, respectively, and thus generalizability. In this paper, we focus on agricultural crime victimization— including theft of farm equipment, crops, livestock, and chemicals—an offense that opportunity theory appears well‐situated to explain. Specifically, we examine whether key dimensions of the theory are empirically associated with the likelihood of victimization and also examine factors associated with farmers' use of guardianship measures. In contrast to much previous research, we combine multiple individual‐level measures of these dimensions. We conclude that the theory partially accounts for variation in agricultural crime victimization, depending on the type of crime, and that greater work is needed investigating how key dimensions of opportunity theory should be conceptualized and operationalized in rural contexts. The study's implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Household Enterprises and Poverty Reduction in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Employment in Household Enterprises (HEs) has been an integral part of the recent economic growth in sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA). Yet employment and development strategies tend to exclude the sector, despite the fact that households with HEs tend to be richer. A good example is Mozambique, where 34% of households rely on income from this source. Analysis of household livelihoods using panel data shows that starting HEs is associated with upward wealth mobility and poverty reduction, particularly for rural and poorly‐educated households. Targeted programmes directed towards the constraints to HE creation, survival and income growth would be likely to enhance the effectiveness of employment and poverty reduction strategies in Mozambique as well as in other low income countries in SSA.     

Reconsidering Ideological Lines: Beliefs about Poverty in America*

Our nation's policy to reduce poverty reflects the belief that poverty is caused by institutional discrimination. This study first identifies the ideological and political nature of this position in relation to the classically ideological individualistic and structural beliefs about poverty. Second, it tests a block variable regression model of popular support for the various belief sets to determine how deeply Americans divide along traditional ideological lines. This model includes not only objective status and demographic factors but subjective variables as well. The results indicate only shallow cleavages in beliefs about poverty and account for why previous studies found deeper ones. Support for the institutional discrimination position is especially broad and is independent of support for individualistic or structural beliefs. These findings suggest that this position and its policy represent a successful political compromise and a viable way for people to resolve their ideological inconsistencies.     

Public Attributions for Poverty in Canada*

Les auteurs de cet article décrivent les caractéristiques sociales de la pauvreté en utilisant des données d'interviews téléphoniques effectuées en 2002 au moyen d'un échantillon aléatoire d'adultes sélectionnéà partir de huit voisinages à Toronto et Edmonton, enrichi par des données d'interviews. Une régression logistique multivariée a été utilisée afin de prédire l'attribution des caractéristiques structurelles, individualistes, intergénérationnelles et fatalistes à la pauvreté, en se servant de variables démographiques et de la variable exposition à la pauvreté. Les participants étaient plus susceptibles d'expliquer la pauvreté par des causes structurelles et moins susceptibles de favoriser une explication individualiste. Le revenu a été associé négativement à des déterminants individualistes, fatalistes et à une des causes structurelles, et lié positivement au facteur intergénérationnel.
This paper describes public attributions for poverty using data from telephone interviews conducted in 2002 with a random sample of adults from eight neighbourhoods in Toronto and Edmonton, supplemented with interview data. Multivariate logistic regression was used to predict support for structural, individualistic, intergenerational and fatalistic attributions for poverty by demographic and exposure-to-poverty variables. Participants were most likely to attribute poverty to structural causes and least likely to favour individualistic attributions. Income was negatively associated with individualistic, fatalistic and one of the structural attributions, and positively related to the intergenerational attribution.     

Women's Voices: Explaining Poverty and Plenty in a Rural Community*

Abstract This paper explores how a multiclass sample of white rural women in an economically depressed, overwhelmingly nonfarm community explain both their own families' economic circumstances and those of the most disadvantaged families in their community. All women in the sample—even those with a history of economic instability and welfare receipt—articulate an ethic of family self‐sufficiency. They uniformly believe that anyone who can work should work, although they vary in their definition of who “can work.” In general, the lower the social class, the greater the understanding of the social processes that precipitate and perpetuate poverty. Both working‐class and poor women clearly recognize the limitations of the local market for labor. Sample women are ambivalent about welfare receipt and welfare reform. Although they believe that families should be self‐supporting, many recognize the necessity of welfare for the survival of some families in the community.     

Household Poverty in Rural and Metropolitan-Core Areas of the United States1

Abstract Urban poverty and rural development literatures are used to identify the determinants of poverty, resulting in the hypothesis that controlling for household and contextual-level variables would reduce metropolitan (metro) core versus rural differences in the likelihood of poverty. Modeling data from the 1985 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, rural households have the highest probability of poverty followed by the metro core. Both household and contextual factors were important determinants of the chances of household poverty. However, controlling for these determinants failed to eliminate the greater likelihood of rural versus metro-core poverty. Findings indicate the need for new directions in future poverty research and a reconsideration of the importance of space in sociological theory.