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The literature on homelessness tends to focus on risk factors in people's social and personal lives that contribute to their situation of being without a permanent home. Alternatively, the following describes innate factors of intimate relationships that contribute to a situation of homelessness for men and women. We conducted interviews with 61 people experiencing homelessness in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We were particularly interested in documenting with greater specificity their perceptions of their individual pathways to and from homelessness. Three themes emerged from the data describing the intersection between respondents’ intimate relationships and their situation of homelessness: (1) relationship breakdown; (2) the role and impact of having intimate partners during a period of homelessness; and (3) the nature of the intimate relationship and its impact on housing. The data suggest that aspects of intimate relationships should be considered by social service agencies when addressing a person's situation of homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of population ageing and low retirement incomes, the UK government is encouraging delayed retirement. However, the OECD has argued that UK means-tested benefits disincentivise employment for the poorest, and Vickerstaff (2006b) has suggested managers have typically controlled opportunities to work beyond 65. In the US, contrastingly, benefits are meagre and difficult to access, and age discrimination legislation protects individuals from forced retirement. Would a US ‘self-reliance’ policy approach increase employment amongst the poorest over 65s in the UK and enhance or diminish their financial position? The evidence suggests that extending UK age discrimination legislation and restricting benefits would increase overall employment past 65, although not necessarily to US levels. Analysis of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and the US Health and Retirement Study finds the poorest over 65s were more likely to work in the USA than in England in 2002. However, within the USA, employment amongst the poorest was still low, especially compared with wealthier groups; logistic regression analysis primarily attributes this to lower levels of health and education. A US policy approach would therefore most likely damage the financial position of the poorest in the UK, as increased employment would not sufficiently compensate for lost benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a long tradition in social policy of discussing and critiquing the notion of ‘deservingness’ in relation to ‘the poor’. This paper will apply such debates to ‘the rich’ to consider the grounds on which this group might be considered ‘deserving’. The paper identifies three sets of arguments. The first set of arguments concerns the appropriateness of rewarding merit/hard work/effort/risk-taking etc. The second concerns more consequentialist/economic arguments about providing incentives for wealth creation. And the third considers the character and behaviour of the rich. As well as discussing the potential criteria for deservingness, the paper will also debate whether the degree of income and wealth gained by the rich is deserved. Finally, the paper will discuss the social policy implications, including taxation policies, which emerge from this debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed. We have attempted to analyse overlap in two ways. First, by exploring the dimensions of poverty cumulatively, we have found that, the more dimensions people are poor on, the more they are unlike the non-poor and the poor on only one dimension, in their characteristics and in their social exclusion. Second, by treating particular dimensions as meriting more attention than others, we explored three permutations of this type and concluded that, while each permutation were more unlike the non-poor than those poor on a single dimension, they were not as unlike the non-poor as the cumulatively poor were. These results indicate that accumulation might be a better way of using overlapping measures of poverty than by giving priority to one dimension over another. The implication of the paper is that it is not safe to rely on one measure of poverty - the results obtained are just not reliable enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional methods of analysis of poverty assume resources are shared so that each individual in a household/family has the same standard of living. This article measures differences between spouses in a large sample in indicators of deprivation of the type used in recent studies of poverty at household level. The quite limited overall imbalance in measured deprivation in favour of husbands suggests that applying such indicators to individuals will not reveal a substantial reservoir of hidden poverty among wives in non-poor households, nor much greater deprivation among women than men in poor households. This points to the need to develop more sensitive indicators of deprivation designed to measure individual living standards and poverty status, which can fit within the framework of traditional poverty research using large samples. It also highlights the need for clarification of the underlying poverty concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the discussions of the Beveridge Committee of 1942 about the ideas of need and measures of poverty to be used. The evidence shows that the Committee knew very well that its proposed benefit levels were not enough for social participation. The author of the article reviews the concepts of poverty and need used by Beveridge and the members of his committee and uses their detailed working papers to show how they arrived at the conclusions embodied in their report "Social Insurance and Allied Services." The issues are important for reasons beyond the political and academic. The word "poverty" has, of course, a great many meanings in common use. Writers on Beveridge have disagreed in their interpretations of the notions of poverty embodied in Beveridge's recommended benefit scales and one aim of this article is to see what the records themselves suggest. Some commentators have suggested that in 1942 Beveridge used more generous and participatory approaches to the definition of human needs than implied by the minimum subsistence level of "primary poverty."

The identification of the poor in this paper follows that of most contemporary applied work and consists of comparing a scaler indicator of welfare with a predetermined minimum level. The data is provided by the 1985 Family Expenditure Survey. Two measures of welfare are developed, one based on income which reflects the entitlement analysis of poverty and the other on expenditure, reflecting the standard of living. Households ranked very low by expenditure are considerably less likely to be ranked highly by income than vice versa. Further doubt on the rankings suggested by the income measure is provided by ownership of consumer durables. The expenditure measure suggests that the number of poor retired individuals is more than three times that implied by the income measure. The instability of the latter measure suggests that more confidence can be placed on assertions based on evidence employing the expenditure measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainsteam poverty analysis is deficient because it ignores important within-household aspects. This point has been made by many, and stressed by feminists especially, yet mainstream poverty measurement practice remains unchanged. Why is this? What should we be doing? This paper examines anew the case for taking within-household factors into account in poverty measurement. The analysis reveals a number of unresolved issues including some problems with recent feminist arguments, but concludes that there is a good case for changing current practice. To demonstrate that this is feasible, four research projects are described. These are my agenda for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the authors' qualitative study of decision-making in low income households casts new light on council house sales in a least-favoured housing estate. Under pressure from rising rents and rumours of privatisation, poor tenants are deciding to buy their houses as a way of securing their future in the area and controlling their personal environment, rather than as an escape from a residual `ghetto' of welfare housing. This raises a number of issues in relation to current theories about housing tenure, especially those which distinguish sharply between the material and ideological bases of owner occupation and local authority tenancy. The authors argue that their respondents' reasons for wanting to buy do not constitute a rejection of collectivism as much as an attempt to preserve the endangered advantages of their situation on the estate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news briefs related to social policy in the U.S. in 1989. According to data from the Low Pay Unit and the Child Poverty Action Group, the total number of people living on or below the poverty line has increased by 55% between 1979 and 1985 to 9.4 million. Meanwhile, a report from the U.S. National Audit Office has concluded that there was little evident of any improvement in the quality of service provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Social Services.