Subjective Measures of Poverty

POVERTY IS CUSTOMARILY defined as a lack of needed resources, principally food and those leading to safety. Most researchers would ideally wish to measure poverty objectively, according to some internationally recognized set of criteria. The most well-known are incomes of more or less than $1 or $2 (purchasing power parity) per day. In the United States, the 2003 poverty threshold for a three-person family with one child was $14,810 per annum. However, objective measures are not always relevant. Poverty can exist in developed countries but very rarely in terms of the kind of absolute [Page 1036]poverty that can lead to threat of starvation. One approach to measuring relative forms of poverty would be to consider poverty in this case to consist of a threshold of income, which would be a fraction of the national mean, or median, income. Another approach is to ask individuals directly whether they consider themselves to be poor, and how they determine what poverty is. Subjective measures such as this tend to focus on an ability to access social and economic opportunities and comparisons with peer groups. Some might define themselves as poor because of lack of a television or as being on the wrong side of the digital divide. Analysis following these lines tends to arouse public criticism, which is often mingled with contempt for people who are deemed to be part of the improvident poor.

Subjective measures are also appropriate in fieldwork in societies about which comparatively little is known, and in which conventional patterns of understanding poverty may be inappropriate. For example, many developing societies have intricate family and neighborhood networks that can be used to mitigate sudden shortages of food or other items that might not be captured by rigidly conceived objective criteria. However, young men in those same societies might feel impoverished if they were unable to assemble the goods necessary for a dowry, and hence could not marry. In cases such as this, employing subjective criteria is simply good research practice. It is usually possible, in any case, subsequently to formalize subjective criteria into objective measures.

More generally, as income levels rise, societies are becoming more interested in subjective measures of personal satisfaction and self-realization. This has helped shape the debate about suitable measures of poverty by suggesting that, once certain thresholds are reached, other measures of well-being become more important. These include such issues as personal dignity, achievement, and self-esteem. They also include freedom from stress or anxiety caused by financial or housing issues, and other value judgments that are very difficult to assess accurately. In sharply unequal societies, lifting people out of poverty simply by providing income is a necessary, but not sufficient, aspect.