Defining Poverty

Poverty is a contested concept - there is little agreement on how it should be either defined or measured. This is particularly true of attempts to define relative poverty. Thus, contemporary attempts to investigate poverty usually fall back on official subsistence definitions, as represented by the safety-net minimum social security benefit levels. The general term for such minimum income schemes is social assistance, and at the present time in Britain the scheme is called income support. These benefits can be seen as a sort of 'official' poverty line.

However, governments have been reluctant to accept the use of benefit ratesas indicators of poverty since to do so would be to acknowledge the need for far ranging and very costly remedial action. In addition, it should be noted that the more generous a government is in lowering the threshold for entitlement to benefit - allowing more people to claim, the greater the extent of poverty becomes if such entitlement is also used as an index of those people living in poverty, clearly here is an illustration of the extent of poverty beingan artefact of the definition.

Another problem raised by the politically contested nature of poverty is where to draw the line between poverty and inequality.

Poverty then is difficult to pin down and define in a way acceptable to everybody; it clearly has both political and moral dimensions.

	Created by Andrea Leyden over 10 years ago

	Copied by ed.wilson89 over 10 years ago

This Note provides information and sample questions for A-level Sociology students based on culture & identity, families & households and wealth, poverty and welfare. For tips on how to keep your A-level study notes organised, see here: https://www.examtime.com/guide/a-level-revision-online/

A-level Sociology: Culture, Family & Wealth