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There is increasing emphasis on understanding economic advantage alongside disadvantage -- on studying both 'poverty' and 'riches'. This trend prompts and requires new ethical reflection. I argue that in qualitative interview research, a clearer distinction needs to be drawn between ethical commitments to individual research participants, and the group(s) to which they belong. This distinction is often elided in ethics guidelines and when researchers discuss their own work. Attending to the distinction highlights a symmetrical ethical dilemma: researchers studying disadvantage are often motivated to further the interests of the wider group to which their participants belong, yet the study itself risks eliciting or exacerbating negative experiences or identities amongst participants themselves. Conversely, the process of studying advantage frequently bolsters the positive identities or experiences of individual study participants, even as the research findings challenge or subvert the interests of their group.

Covid‐19 has highlighted the inadequacy of UK social security but also the lack of consensus among progressive actors about what would be a better system. One way forward is to focus on the principles that should underpin social security. We present outcomes from a project in which principles were considered by a panel of Expert by Experience benefit claimants. We argue that while scholars often engage in descriptively identifying social security principles in existing policy, the bottom‐up approach presented here offers a way of generating normative principles to guide an improved future system. We identify key contributions of this bottom‐up approach relating to: the critical importance of principles as a guide to the fundamental purpose of social security, and policy making; the relationship between the treatment of claimants and benefit levels as co‐dependent; and how a bottom‐up process can produce results that engage with and contribute holistically to the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literatures on the lived experience of poverty and richness temporal dimensions are underappreciated. Comparing qualitative interviews with those at opposite ends of the income and wealth distributions in the UK, we examine a temporal contrast: while "poor" participants experience money as flows of income which focus orientation to the present and constrain orientation to the future, "rich" participants experience money not only as flows of income, but also in the form of a stock of wealth which facilitates long‐term orientations. Highlighting the enduring nature of wealth and the comparative short‐termism of income, we argue that the way in which capital and income relates to individuals' orientations to the future is important for understanding how economic inequality is experienced. Put differently, the form which economic resources take matters for one's ability to plan and control the future. This insight contributes to our understanding of the experience of being economically advantaged or disadvantaged, with implications for (social) policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]